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Lookup NU author(s): Dr David VenturaORCiD
This is the final published version of an article that has been published in its final definitive form by Association des Etudes Francaises et Francophones d'Irlande, 2025.
For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.
This paper elucidates Édouard Glissant's contribution to contemporary scholarship on the afterlives of slavery by examining his varied explorations of the enduring temporal significance of the Middle Passage. In theoretical writings such as Poétique de la Relation, Glissant extensively casts the Middle Passage as an abyss (gouffre) that radically disfigures all senses of time for those who–or whose ancestors–survived the trauma of forced transportation to the Americas. Moreover, in fictional works such as Le Quatrième siècle, La Case du commandeur and Mahagony, Glissant creatively reimagines the history of Martinique to explore how this abyssal experience continues to ambivalently shape the lived temporality of Caribbean peoples today. Addressing a tendency in recent Glissant scholarship to separate his theoretical from his fictional texts, this paper reads both in tandem to argue that they diffract one another to portray the Middle Passage as an ambivalent temporal beginning: as both the radical rupture in temporal coordinates imposed by the historical experience of slavery, and as a condition for potential shifts away from the oppressive, racializing, and colonizing structures of time that have emerged in the wake of that brutal historical legacy. Indeed, insofar as Glissant conceives the meaning of the Middle Passage as an abyssal double beginning, his work intimates vital poetic strategies of resistance and refusal that challenge the unjust configurations of time that continue to dominate our worlds today.
Author(s): Ventura D
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Irish Journal of French Studies
Year: 2025
Volume: 24
Issue: 1
Pages: 186-213
Print publication date: 01/08/2025
Acceptance date: 04/05/2025
Date deposited: 17/11/2025
ISSN (electronic): 2009-941X
Publisher: Association des Etudes Francaises et Francophones d'Irlande
URL: https://doi.org/10.7173/164913325840292867
DOI: 10.7173/164913325840292867
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