Towards a Geopoetics of Disaster: The Place of Glissant in Postcolonial Disaster Studies
Abstract as pdf
Corresponding Author:
Emily Eyestone
Princeton University United States of America
eyestone@princeton.edu
Author(s):
Researchers in the field of disaster studies increasingly point out that the term, natural disaster, reproduces a problematic division between a hostile and unpredictable environment on one hand, and human efforts to control it on the other. In parts of the Global South that are particularly vulnerable to hazards, the opposition between human order and natural catastrophe neglects the role of socio-historic factors in disproportionately exposing marginalized and poor communities to the worst effects of disasters. As climate change magnifies the frequency and impact of hazards, the need for a more nuanced and postcolonial approach to disaster studies is all the more urgent.
I suggest that Edouard Glissant’s work has an essential role in the evolving framework of postcolonial disaster studies. Glissant’s writing from the 1980’s-90’s marks a turn from the regional to the global, and he develops concepts like Relation and chaos as possible correctives to the homogenizing, managerial impulses of “continental” thought. Glissant’s insistence upon the interconnected nature of culture and history can help to reframe our understanding of hazards from peripheral tragedies of the underdeveloped world, to undeniably global events produced at the intersection of many factors including climate change, colonialism, poverty, and resource depletion.
I explore how the concepts of chaos and what I call “durational disaster” operate in Glissant’s final poetry collections, Pays rêvé, pays réel (1985) and Les grands chaos (1993). Glissant’s durational poetics, developed in Poétique de la relation, may be applied to a reevaluation of natural disaster away from its purely geophysical causes. Duration emphasizes the complex etiology of catastrophe in the Caribbean, which is in some way always linked to the foundational disaster of the Middle Passage. Slavery operates continually in the present, shaping everything from the postcolonial political economy to disaster response and recovery. Chaos in the Caribbean is presented along a kind of longue-durée in which catastrophic events are not locally or historically contained; rather, chaos accumulates over time and space to decisively shape the present. If chaos in the European imaginary is generally associated with confusion and the absence of meaning, Glissant’s geopoetics legitimize it as a local form of dynamic, non-totalizing, and anti-systemic knowledge. A careful consideration of chaos and duration will reveal the critical contributions of Glissant’s relational thinking to conceiving a postcolonial disaster studies.
De-colonizing disasters: Affect, race, and queer theory