Sun of Consciousness by Edouard Glissant
Soleil de la Conscience (Sun of Consciousness) was Martinican philosopher Edouard Glissants first published work, and opened the Poetique (Poetics) strain of his oeuvre. This book-length essay, which is characterized by its exploratory, intimate character, announces Glissants concerns with creolisation (creolization), mondialite (worldliness, as against globalization), or opacite (opacity) and inscribes in this work a refusal of colonialism and of inverted exoticism. The sense of estrangement experienced by the author who arrives as a foreigner in a country to which he is bound by the first page of his passport is the authors principal preoccupation. By positioning himself as both different and same, Glissant opens a space for the writing of a(nother) history: that of the Caribbean.