Director: Manthia Diawara
Production: Lydie Diakhaté,
K’a Yéléma Productions
Editing: Laurence Attali
Camera: Karim Akadiri Soumaila
Sound: Didier Brudell,
Karim Akadiri Soumaila
Country: USA, France
Year: 2010
Runtime: 50’
Colour, sound
Languages: English, French
Subtitles: English

With Édouard Glissant.

In 2009, Manthia Diawara followed Édouard Glissant with his camera during a cross-Atlantic journey from South Hampton (UK) to Brooklyn (New York) on the Queen Mary II. This poetic meditation continued in Martinique, the native home of Glissant. The extraordinary voyages resulted in the production of an intellectual biography in which Glissant elaborates on his theory of relation and the concept of ‘tout-monde.’ Glissant was one of the most important contemporary thinkers. In the 1980s, his theories of creolisation, diversity and otherness, as elaborated in the book Le Discours Antillais (1981), were considered seminal texts for the emerging studies of multiculturalism, identity politics, minority literature and Black Atlanticism. In the 1990s and 2000, he developed a theory he called ‘poetique de la relation,’ and ‘tout-monde’, where the concept of ‘relation’ is perceived as an autonomous entity, moving between objects and providing them with energy, poesis and difference. In his book Philosophie de la relation (2009), Glissant used the concept to meditate on the new meanings of globalisation, chaos, violence, equality and justice.