French · 1928–2011
Édouard Glissant was a Martinican poet, novelist, essayist, and philosopher whose concepts of Relation, creolization, and opacity have become fundamental to contemporary thinking about culture, identity, and globalization. He studied with Aimé Césaire, was politically active in the anticolonial movement, and taught at universities in Martinique, Louisiana, and New York. His major theoretical works — Caribbean Discourse, Poetics of Relation, Treatise on the Whole-World — constitute one of the most original philosophical achievements of the late twentieth century.