Beginning in the Middle: Deleuze, Glissant, and Colonial Difference

Yountae, An

doi:10.1080/14735784.2013.856768

Cited by 24 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…In his works, Glissant returns time and again to the Middle Passage in particular as the defining historical event, or, if you will, the event that obliterates history as a linear root structure. For Glissant, the Caribbean Sea is inevitably an abyss and a graveyard, drowning the past and creating something entirely new and different out of the fragments washed ashore (Parham and Drabinski 2015;Yountae 2014). The world begins anew at the shoreline and any search for the cultural origins of Caribbeanness is therefore futile.…”

Section: Original Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Opacity, difference and not knowing: what can psychiatry learn from the work of Édouard Glissant?

Strand

2024

Med Humanities

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Martinican poet, novelist and cultural theorist Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) rejected contemporary simplistic notions of creole hybridity popularised in the 1980s and 1990s in favour of a unique and explicitly antiessentialist construct of Caribbeanness—a form of being that embraces place while shunning any associated ideas of rootednesss. Throughout his work, there is a constant tension between the local and the global, the particular and the universal, the essentialist and the homogenising, a tension that is never resolved but used creatively to stake out an emergent third position against a backdrop of a metaphorical Caribbean seascape. The purpose of this article is to shed light on a central idea developed by Glissant: the importance of acknowledging opacity in the encounter with the Other, in contrast to idealised notions of transparency as inherently desirable. This ‘right to opacity’ has been embraced in poststructural theory, postcolonial activism and contemporary art. However, I argue that opacity is also a highly relevant notion in clinical contexts, as an essential resource for understanding concepts such as first-person, second-person and third-person perspectives in the phenomenology of mental health and illness. For illustration, I point to a number of clinical tools and approaches—such as the Cultural Formulation Interview, Therapeutic Assessment and the employment of a not-knowing stance in mentalisation-based treatment—that successfully incorporate a respect for opacity as a core value in the clinician-patient encounter. This article is not an attempt to offer a definitive how-to guide on how to make use of the ideas of Édouard Glissant in the clinic; instead, I hope to inspire further discussion about how various notions of opacity and transparency come into play for mental health practitioners and how acknowledging alterity and difference may contribute to more fruitful and respectful ways of engaging with the patient-as-Other.

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Section: Original Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Opacity, difference and not knowing: what can psychiatry learn from the work of Édouard Glissant?

Strand

2024

Med Humanities

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“…What I therefore suggest is that charting mobility assemblages responds to a body of feminist critiques that have pointed to the colonial underpinnings of abstract mobility in philosophies of nomadism. (see Wuthnow 2002, Yountae 2014 Situated within assemblage theories then, the figuration of the nomad encompasses components of a radical conceptualization of subjectivity, but it is still outside 'the syntax of the real'. As Kolozova explains, the latter is a process in Laruelle's 'nonphilosophy' that attempts to chart the real in a rigorous way; it is affected by the immanence of the real and rejects a-priori philosophical decisions or gestures that would obscure and ultimately substitute it (2014,9).…”

Section: Mobility Assemblages and Entanglements With The Realmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feeling the Real: The Non-Nomadic Subject of Feminism

Tamboukou

2020

Theory, Culture & Society

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Nomadism as a spatial concept denoting uncharted movements has opened up non-static ways of theorizing the subject in feminist theory and beyond. But it seems that the nomads of the real world and their torturing wanderings today have irrevocably challenged the romance of unregulated movement and force us to radically rethink the very concept of nomadism itself. In this paper I address the aporias that women's entanglement in current mobility assemblages has raised in the ways we understand and imagine the subject of feminism. In doing so, I experiment with the concept of the non-nomad as an emergent figuration that retains the radicalism of nomadic theories, while pointing to their margins, shadows and exclusions.

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“…For Dixon, feminist geopolitics can deploy a critically feminist materialism to denaturalize a Western body politics rooted in sexual difference, and, further, to rethink the body politic by asking what a non-androcentric body politic might mean for ‘freedom, autonomy, and agency’, (p. 49) while taking care not to romanticize an ‘unqualified, joyful affirmation of multiplicity’ that would ‘fall back into a universalising of the political subject’ (2015: 49; citing Yountae, 2014). In the introduction, Dixon introduces the book’s feminist materialist emphasis on ‘earthliness’ to begin to make the case for how a feminist geopolitics can complement and run alongside and cut through the critical geopolitics approach to unveiling the ‘making and unmaking of social bodies’ (p. 9).…”

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confidence: 99%

Broken earth, shattered bones and bodies made flesh: A fragmentary and expansive Feminist Geopolitics

Smith

2018

Dialogues in Human Geography

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Beginning in the Middle: Deleuze, Glissant, and Colonial Difference

Cited by 24 publications

References 7 publications

Opacity, difference and not knowing: what can psychiatry learn from the work of Édouard Glissant?

Opacity, difference and not knowing: what can psychiatry learn from the work of Édouard Glissant?

Feeling the Real: The Non-Nomadic Subject of Feminism

Broken earth, shattered bones and bodies made flesh: A fragmentary and expansive Feminist Geopolitics

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