This study is striking for the intelligence of its composition and its arguments, which allow us to paint a unique portrait of Edouard Glissant as a thinker of the globalized world today... * French Studies *
Coombes's chronological engagement with the texts provides a well-informed theoretical panorama of Glissant and of postcolonialism, globalism, and immigration in emerging, modern, multifaceted societies ... Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. * CHOICE *
Arguing that the tension between minoritarian and hegemonic cultures is at the heart of Edouard Glissant's entire theoretical enterprise, Coombes offers us a spirited and informed refutation of charges of political quietism in Glissant's later works. Far from being a sign of political naivete, the utopian nature of Glissant's political thought is shown to be a necessary prelude to a new progressive, liberatory politics. This is a welcome introduction to the ideas of a major contemporary political theorist. -- J. Michael Dash, Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture, New York University, USA
To divide the thought of Edouard Glissant into an early period of Caribbean radical politics on the one hand and a mature phase advancing a depolitized cosmopolitan life of the mind on the other distorts Glissants legacy. Sam Coombes rescues Glissant from facile naysayers upholding this misrepresentation. He does so through examination of the late Glissant on creolization, immigration, neoliberal political economy, negotiations of universalism and particularism, and visions of human existence that acknowledge nation-state politics while also providing alternative futures for everyday people to resist enslaving dynamics of globalization. A single word captures that projects implication: freedom. -- Neil Roberts, President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association and Associate Professor of Africana Studies, Williams College, USA
