Provence Book

A beautiful methodology which breaks down constructs of worldview and, in essence, helps us stop playing God and to get on with embracing others, being oneself an "other". An excerpt from a research paper I wrote on this methodology:

Edouard Glissant, in his text Poetics of Relation, finds it impossible and limiting to attempt to grasp the world, or all its peoples, in any type of system, or to simply assimilate all working classes into one universal, political melting pot of humanity (Glissant 135). He uses a term, 'Chaos-monde', which at its essence considers the world in fluidity and suggests that we must embrace, but not group together, all the elements and forms of expression within the totality (Glissant 95). Thus the only totality we can consider for our world is one of chaos, not in a meaningless, nihilistic way, but in a way that will always escape our full understanding and categorizing.
Edouard Glissant offers not a universal, idealized view of language and identity, but a heterogenous process of uprooting the cultural artifacts of consciousness we carry, by allowing them to be informed and transformed by others. Glissant calls this the process of creolization, using the Colonial example of the French language being intermingled and changed within local Caribbean dialects (Glissant 5). French is not the dominant language used to subvert populations (though it was thought to be by the colonizers), nor is it ignored by the colonized. Rather, through the relations between peoples, the process mixes these languages and creates something new, unique and localized to the situation. This process, rhizomatic in its movements, is interdependent on the relations between people, bridging the abyss of difference that separates humans. It is the relation that permeates and works in ourselves, for "sometimes, by taking up the problems of the Other, it is possible to find oneself" (Glissant 18).