L’Esprit créateur: Édouard Glissant’s Thought in Literature and Culture
Due Date: 09-01-2020
The Fall 2021 issue of L’Esprit créateur honors Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) on the tenth anniversary of his death and recognizes his biographer and renowned Caribbean scholar, J. Michael Dash (1948–2019). The Martiniquan poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, theorist, and philosopher continues to have a major impact on literature and contemporary thought, as manifested in the many essays, books, colloquia, and documentary films devoted to him. In 2018 alone, the Institut du Tout-Monde established the Centre International d’études Édouard Glissant and film director Guillaume Robillard released Poétique du divers. This issue seeks essays that reflect on his key theoretical concepts—relation, opacité, mondialité, rhizomatic identity, creolization, Tout-Monde—and how they are applied in works by contemporary writers and artists, sometimes in unexpected ways. Examples range from rapper Abd al Malik’s show Le Jeune Noir à l’épée at the Musée d’Orsay, which became an album and a book, to the diverse cluster of artists who interpreted notions of identity construction for the Manhattan exhibition Lydia Cabrera and Édouard Glissant: Trembling Thinking cocurated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Gabriela Rangel, and Asad Raz. Proposals may consider literary texts, cultural practices, architecture, visual and performance art (including music, film, and sports), which are informed by Glissant’s ideas. Our goal is to demonstrate the breadth of Glissant’s legacy and to show how it continues to generate new modes of creation and thinking.
All submitted articles should be original and must not be under consideration for publication elsewhere. Please send article proposals in English or French (300–400 words) together with a short biography to Renée Larrier (rlarrier@french.rutgers.edu) and Georgette Mitchell (gmm139@scarletmail.rutgers.edu) by 1 September 2020. The deadline for completed articles (max. 6,000 words) will be 1 March 2021.