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This article seeks areas of reciprocity and overlap between the theories of Gilroy and Glissant of the last twenty-five or so years. Its point of departure is the conviction that both authors progress from a focus on specific black communities to viewing the black postcolonial condition in general as a harbinger for, and paradigmatic of, the leading cultural trends which characterise today's era of globalisation.
I want to emphasize the decidedly transnational character of modes of production, social movements and informal exchanges [...] the example offered by the history of the black Atlantic world [...] contains a fluid and dynamic cultural system that escapes the grasp of nation-states and national conceptions of political and economic development.
Paul Gilroy Small Acts
Thought resulting from intermixing ["métissage"], and from the uncertain value not only of cultural intermixing but, more importantly, from cultures of intermixing, which perhaps protect us from the limitations and intolerance that lie in wait for us, and will open up new spaces of relation.1 [My translation]
Edouard Glissant, Traité du tout-monde
Paul Gilroy (1956- ) and Edouard Glissant (1928-2011) have theorised both the postcolonial condition of the black communities they originated in, and also that condition in so far as they regard it as a harbinger, and even a paradigm, for rapidly evolving relationships between diverse cultures in the context of globalisation. They evidently share a number of key characteristics: both thinkers are either from, or have strong links to, West Indian postcolonial communities. The cultural origins of both lie in former colonies of major European colonial nations, Britain and France, and each has been trying to reinterpret and negotiate the colonial legacy in a myriad of ways. This article focuses on Gilroy and Glissant not just as individual thinkers, each with his own outlook and vision, but also the ways in which these visions highlight broader issues of the British and French colonial inheritances. Far from reducing either thinker to his own context, this article intends to highlight the constant dialectical interplay between individual and cultural context, and therefore to try to elucidate this complex, multiple-facetted issue: that of two postcolonial intellectuals from two parallel colonial situations, both of whom have been trying to make sense not just of the histories of...