Notes

1. Fred Moten, In the Break: Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 24.
2. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, (Totowa, NJ: Zed, 1983), 73.
3. Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 141.
4. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and The Rise of Black Internationalism, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
5. Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, translated by J Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989), 77 (my emphasis).
6. Édouard Glissant, Poetic Intention, 1969, translated by Natalie Steverns with Anne Malena (Callicoon, NY: Nightboat, 2010), 230.
7. Derek Walcott, Tiepolo’s Hound (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 162.
8. This would explain Glissant’s frequent invocation of the spiral throughout his texts. The cosmic preeminence of the spiral as life’s form and thus as that which ought to organize social and political life has been known to many native communities throughout the world for centuries. See, for instance, myths collected in David A. Leeming, The World of Myth (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) and in Scott Leonard and Michael McClure, eds., Myth and Knowing: An Introduction to World Mythology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004). In the context of an essay connecting Glissant to biopolitics, Alessandro Corio quite convincingly discusses the spiral in Glissant’s oeuvre as “the form of the living’s inherent coming-into-being, as well as the form of language generated from this transition.” Alessandro Corio, “The Living and the Poetic Intention: Glissant’s Biopolitics of Literature,” Callaloo 36, no. 4 (2013): 917.
9. With this phrase I summarize Western capitalism’s hegemonic interpretation of the ocean. On this issue, see, for instance, the following collections: Daniel Finamore, ed., Maritime History as World History: New Perspectives on Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology (Salem, MA: Peabody Essex Museum; Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2004); Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthum, eds., Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (New York: Routledge, 2004); Jonathan Raban, ed., The Oxford Book of the Sea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Consult also Elizabeth Mancke, “Early Modern Expansion and the Politicization of Oceanic Space,” Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (1999): 225–36. Most especially, see Philip E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
10. For the purposes of this essay, I prefer to use the word “coast,” which refers specifically to the area where land and sea meet, rather than the more general terms “shore,” “shoreline,” or “littoral zone,” which, besides the encounter of land and sea, refer also to that of land and other bodies of water such as rivers and lakes. A coast includes the geological formation of beaches but is not limited to them.
11. I use these concepts in the sense adumbrated by Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, translated by Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).
12. The question of whether ancestral natives (for instance, the multifarious groups that populated the Pacific islands or the relatives of Arawaks who settled on the Caribbean islands) also experienced the possessive impulse is unavoidable, as it should be. But as with many such questions, it is also necessary to declare a definitive answer impossible. In any case, we have enough information to assume that if and when there was a possessive impulse (rather than or along with, just for the sake of examples, a haphazard impulse, a contingent impulse, an adventurous impulse, a flight impulse, a life impulse, a death impulse, and so on), it responded to a very different “horizon of expectations” or, to put it bluntly, to a very different world. The possible combinations of different kinds of impulses—also present, of course, in imperial captains and sailors—must also have been organized differently, according to other structural, social, political, and psychical arrangements.
13. See, for instance, the following collections: David T. Duval, ed., Tourism in the Caribbean: Trends, Development, Prospects (London: Routledge, 2004); Yorghos Apostolopoulos and Dennis J. Gayle, eds., Island Tourism and Sustainable Development: Caribbean, Pacific and Mediterranean Experiences (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002); Michael V. Conlon and Tom Baum, eds., Island Tourism: Management Principles and Practices (New York: John Wiley, 1995).
14. Kincaid’s A Small Place is as scathing a critique of tourism’s unequal distribution of power in the Caribbean as one could find. But in direct opposition to Glissant’s defense of Caribbean smallness, the book is equally biting when it comes to Antigua’s small size. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1988).
15. The structural similarity of these two historical moments is poignantly laid bare in Olive Senior’s remarkable poem “Meditation on Yellow,” in Gardening in the Tropics, 11–18, (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2005).
16. The following are but a few examples of the latter phenomena in the Caribbean and elsewhere: the recent BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico; the paintings on the “tropical dump” by Cuban Tomás Sánchez; the sudden and massive death of legions of fish and whale species in the Pacific and the Atlantic; the use of the ocean as trash disposal; the history of the so-called Million Dollar Point, a U.S. military underwater dump in the Pacific; and the phenomenon of “plastic soups” (also called “garbage islands”!) on the ocean, among many others. On the use of the ocean as trash disposal, see, for instance, Patricia Yaeger, “Sea Trash, Dark Pools and the Tragedy of the Commons,” PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 523–45; Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Heavy Waters: Waste and Atlantic Modernity,” PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 703–12. For a history of Million Dollar Point, see Sasha Archibald, “Million Dollar Point,” Cabinet, no. 10 (Spring 2003), www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/10/million_point.php.
17. For more on these matters, see, among others, David Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Samuel M. Wilson, The Archaeology of the Caribbean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); The Indigenous People of the Caribbean (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999); Irving Rouse, The Taínos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996).
18. See Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000); Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (London: Penguin, 2007); Jon Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself: Documenting the American South (London: Self-published, 1780), available at Documenting the American South, http://docsouth.unc.edu.libezp.lib.lsu.edu/neh/equiano1/menu. html; Sybille Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
19. Caribbean texts have not failed to record this deep fear of the sea. In Puerto Rico, notorious examples include Pedreira’s Insularismo and Marqués’ La víspera del hombre and “En la popa hay un cuerpo reclinado.” The Cuban Alberto Pedro’s play Mar nuestro is a more recent example, although the fear of the sea in this case is directly related to the balseros’ experience. Another Cuban, Virgilio Piñera, wrote “La isla en peso,” a remarkable poem figuring the sea as an asphyxiating force. But Pi–era also wrote “Isla,” an often neglected poem on becoming an island as a liberating experience “from all restlessness.” See Antonio Pedreira, Insularismo: Ensayos de interpretación puertorrique–a (Hato Rey: C.M.A. Books Distributors, 1934); René Marqués, La víspera del hombre (Río Piedras: Editorial Cultural, 1959); René Marqués, “En la popa hay un cuerpo reclinado,” in Cuentos puertorriqueños de hoy, edited by René Marqués, 135–52 (Río Piedras: Editorial Cultural, 1959); Alberto Pedro, Mar nuestro/Manteca (San Juan: Fragmento imán Editores, 2003); Virgilio Piñera, “La isla en peso,” Virgilio Piñera website, edited by Teresa Cristófani Barreto, www.fflch.usp.br/sitesint/virgilio/isla. html; and Virgilio Piñera, “Isla,” Cuba literaria: Virgilio Piñera, edited by Enrique Saínz, www.cubaliteraria.cu/autor/virgilio_pinnera/index.html.
20. “We know what threatens Caribbeanness: the historical balkanization of the islands, the inculcation of different and often ‘opposed’ major languages (the quarrel between French and Anglo-American English), the umbilical cords that maintain, in a rigid or flexible way, many of these islands within the sphere of influence of a particular metropolitan power, the presence of frightening and powerful neighbors, Canada and especially the United States.” Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 222.
21. Although for reasons of space I cannot further develop this issue here, for an analysis focusing on the Anglophone Caribbean I recommend Krista Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). See also Richard Rosa, “Business as Pleasure: Culture, Tourism and Nation in Puerto Rico in the 1930s,” Nepantla: Views from the South 2, no. 3 (2001): 449–88.
22. Ana Lydia Vega, “Mi país es el mar,” in Mirada de doble filo (San Juan: La Editorial de la UPR, 2008), 23–24. This and all other translations from Spanish to English in this essay are my own. For Puerto Rico’s case, see also the valuable research and activism being conducted and supported by the University of Puerto Rico Sea Grant College Program at the Mayagüez campus. Materials can be found at Sea Grant Puerto Rico, http://seagrantpr.org/.
23. For confirmation of the fact that similar preoccupations are constant throughout Glissant’s life, see the recent and excellent collection of critical essays in the journal Callaloo. The essays by Corio, Murdoch, Wiedorn, Britton, and Mardorossian are especially relevant in the present context as well as in that of extending my argument beyond the main books studied here. I situate my work along Forsdick’s and the above-mentioned writers as an emphatic refutation of the argument put forward by some critics to the effect that Glissant became increasingly apolitical in his later work as a result of his more intense focus on poetics. As far as I am concerned, the entirety of Glissant’s work exemplifies the impossibility of separating the two realms—politics and poetics—and, what is more, constitutes an unequivocal defense of the need for a freed poetics if a truly anticolonial politics is to be achieved in the Caribbean. The latter argument, indeed, is the main thrust of the present piece. See Corio, “The Living and the Poetic Intention,” 916–30; H. Adlai Murdoch, “Édouard Glissant’s Creolized World Vision: From Resistance and Relation to Opacité,” Callaloo 36, no. 4 (2013): 875–89; Michael Wiedorn, “Glissant’s Philosophie de la Relation: ‘I have spoken the chaos of writing in the ardor of the poem,” Callaloo 36, no. 4 (2013): 902–15; Celia Britton, “Philosophy, Poetics, Politics,” Callaloo 36, no. 4 (2013): 841–47; Carine M. Mardorossian, “‘Poetics of Landscape’: Édouard Glissant’s Creolized Ecologies,” Callaloo 36, no. 4 (2013): 983–94; Charles Forsdick, “Late Glissant: History, ‘World Literature’, and the Persistence of the Political,” Small Axe 33 (2010): 121–34.
24. The novel The Fourth Century ends with an equivalent clamor for the Caribbean mixed peoples’ “open boat.” Édouard Glissant, The Fourth Century (1964), translated by Betsy Wing (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 292–94.
25. Poetic Intention opens with a similar text titled “Histories,” echoing the regime of slavery but with a runaway as protagonist: “The fugitive—the African bound for the deleterious islands—did not even recognize the taste of night. This unknown night was less dense, more naked, alarming. Far behind him he heard the dogs, but already the acacias had abducted him from the world of hunters; in this way he entered, man of the grande terre, into another history: where, unbeknownst to him, the times were beginning again for him.” Glissant, Poetic Intention, 3.
26. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1990), translated by Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 5–8 (my emphasis).
27. Ibid., 121–26 (my emphasis).
28. Ibid., 205–9 (my emphasis).
29. Glissant, Poetic Intention, 146.
30. Édouard Glissant, Tratado del Todo-Mundo (1997), translated by Mariá Teresa Gallego Urrutia (Barcelona: El Cobre Ediciones, 2006), 15–23 (emphasis in original).
31. Both Corio and Murdoch provide compelling discussions of opacity that closely resemble, albeit in different contexts, my account of the concept. Corio, “The Living and the Poetic Intention,” 924; Murdoch, “Édouard Glissant’s Creolized World Vision,” 884–89.
32. In Poetic Intention, Glissant goes so far as to argue that the meeting of histories—which happens through the sea—has in fact killed History: “Where histories meet, History comes to an end. (The pathetic effort of occidental nations to remain masters of the destiny of the world, and which is vain enough for the Occident itself to split into contrary intentions, suggests to us that the intrusion of (relativizing) relation into the heretofore absolute field of History—has killed History. Thus the first man of the Occident who dreamed of another land (adventurer, merchant, priest, roughneck soldier, or poet of elsewhere) began really to assume and actually to exhaust the Occident. This acting race accomplished the field of the One and opened the world to the Relational, which it does not want to experience).” Glissant, Poetic Intention, 199.
33. Ibid., 1 (my emphasis).
34. Cultural theory has also been a culprit of this. In a footnote on the urgency of a “semiological science,” Barthes distinguishes between the sea and the beach in terms of signification: “Here I am, before the sea; it is true that it bears no message. But on the beach, what material for semiology! Flags, slogans, signals, sign-boards, clothes, suntan even, which are so many messages to me.” Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957, translated by Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 112.
35. Glissant (Caribbean Discourse, 19–26) develops what he understands as the mutually necessary concepts of detour and retour to refer to different strategies of resistance and creation (one of the most prominent of which is the creation of Creole languages) on the part of the enslaved and colonized.
36. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 7.
37. Ibid., 208.
38. Ibid., 7.
39. Referring to the sea, Glissant writes: “I know you who are bank and beyond it mystery.” Édouard Glissant, The Collected Poems, 1994, edited by Jeff Humphries, translated by Jeff Humphries with Melissa Manolas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 49 (emphasis in original).
40. Glissant, Tratado del Todo-Mundo, 31. J. Michael Dash, the critic and translator whose work has carefully followed Glissant’s oeuvre, makes an analogous argument: “Consequently, Glissant visualizes the Caribbean as an unceasing struggle between the reductionist forces of homogenization, or sameness, and the capacity for resistance that is found in cultural opacity.” J. Michael Dash, The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 153.
41. “In the New World servitude to the muse of history has produced a literature of recrimination and despair, a literature of revenge written by the descendants of slaves or a literature of remorse written by the descendants of masters. Because this literature serves historical truth, it yellows into polemic or evaporates in pathos. The truly tough aesthetic of the New World neither explains nor forgives history. It refuses to recognize it as a creative or culpable force. This shame and awe of history possess poets of the Third World who think of language as enslavement and who, in a rage for identity, respect only incoherence or nostalgia.” Derek Walcott, “The Muse of History,” in What the Twilight Says: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 37.
42. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 8.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., 8–9.
45. Ibid., 9.
46. Ibid.
47. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 255.
48. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 125.
49. Glissant, Poetic Intention, 147 (emphasis in original).
50. Kamau Brathwaite, ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey, (Staten Island: We Press, 1999), 29.
51. Ibid., 30.
52. Ibid., 32–33.
53. Ibid., 34.
54. DeLoughrey has usefully characterized Brathwaite’s tidalectics as both a “geopolitical model of history” and “a methodological tool that foregrounds how a dynamic model of geography can elucidate island history and cultural production, providing the framework for exploring the complex and shifting entanglement between sea and land, diaspora and indigeneity, and routes and roots.” Furthermore, “Tidalectics engage what Brathwaite calls an ‘alter/native’ historiography to linear models of colonial progress. This ‘tidal dialectic’ resists the synthesizing telos of Hegel’s dialectic by drawing from a cyclical model, invoking the continual movement and rhythm of the ocean.” Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), 2. Consider also Winks’s description of Brathwaite’s tidalectics and the importance of water for the latter’s thought. Christopher Winks, Symbolic Cities in Caribbean Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 21.
55. Brathwaite, ConVERSations, 29.
56. Although I cannot discuss this at length here, the fact that both the young man in Glissant’s Poetics of Relation and the woman in Brathwaite’s tidalectical image are walking should not go unnoticed. This bodily movement provides a perceptive reality immensely different to that of traveling by car, plane, or ship. For a compelling argument on the differences between walking and traveling by car, a capitalist regime, see Franco Cassano, Pensamiento meridiano, translated by Roberto Raschella (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, [1996] 2003).
57. Derek Walcott, "The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory," in What Twilight Says: Essays, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 76–77 (my emphasis).
58. Ibid., 72–73 (my emphasis).
59. Ibid., 83–84.
60. Marta Aponte Alsina, “Caminos de la sorpresa: Cartografías del Caribe,” Angélica furiosa, April 15, 2008, http://angelicafuriosa.blogspot.com/2008/04/ caminos-de-la-sorpresa-cartografas-del.html.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid.
63. Édouard Glissant, "In Praise of the Different and of Difference," translated by Celia Britton, Callaloo 36, no. 4 (2013): 861.
64. Ibid., 857.
65. Ibid.
66. Glissant, Poetic Intention, 228.
67. Ibid., 229.