Sun of Consciousness

Soleil de la Conscience (Sun of Consciousness) was Martinican philosopher Edouard Glissant’s 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 author’s 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.