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A Prophetic Vision of the Past: Glissant's Poetic of Nonhistory | DEMOS21

This is a virtual event on Zoom. Registration is mandatory.
Thursday, April 8, 2021 - 18:30 to 20:00

The Center for Critical Democracy Studies at The American University of Paris and Professor Miranda Spieler invite you to the sixth symposium of a 7-part series on "Race, Law and Justice."

A Prophetic Vision of the Past: Glissant's Poetic of Nonhistory (Gary Wilder)

This chapter of my book manuscript, entitled “Untimely History, Unhomely Times: On the Politics of Temporality and Solidarity,” analyzes Édouard Glissant’s innovative understandings of history and critique of contemporary historiography. He developed both from the standpoint of Antillean historical experience which, in his view, anticipated a globalized future that we now inhabit. Specifically, I propose ways of understanding Glissant’s conceptions of nonhistorytormented chronology, a painful sense of time, and a prophetic vision of the past. These temporal concepts are as important for Glissant’s thinking as his more familiar spatial concepts (e.g., creolization, wandering, detour). They are integral to his poetic politics of worldwide Relation. Glissant’s attempt to employ an Antillean optic to think history otherwise also helps us to grasp untimely temporal objects, processes, and practices that shape social life (especially in post-slavery societies), but for which conventional disciplinary history cannot easily account, or even recognize.

Gary Wilder

Gary Wilder is a Professor in the Ph.D. Program of Anthropology, with a cross-appointment in History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he is also Director of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change. He is the author of Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke University Press, 2015) and The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the World Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2005).  His newest book, entitled “Untimely History, Unhomely Times: On the Politics of Temporality and Solidarity,” will be published by Fordham University Press in 2021. In Spring 2018 he co-authored Theses on Theory and History, an open-source digital publication, with Ethan Kleinberg and Joan Wallach Scott. He is co-editor of two books: The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present, with Jini Kim Watson (Fordham University Press, 2018) and The Fernando Coronil Reader: The Struggle for the Life is the Matter, with Mariana Coronil, Laurent Dubois Paul Eiss, Edward Murphy, David Pedersen, and Julie Skurski, (Duke University Press, 2019). He is currently working on a manuscript provisionally entitled “More Abundant Life: Black Radical Humanism and the Atlantic World.”

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