So, Édouard, where do we start?

Where does it start for you?

Glissant
I would first of all like to say something about archipelagos. I think the idea of the archipelago—as a place where we can begin to understand and resolve the contradictions of the world— should be propagated. The archipelagos of the Mediterranean must encounter the archipelagos of Asia, and the archipelago of the Antilles. These archipelagos must encounter each other because, across their many islands, interdependence and difference coexist—and, in this way, they carry the energy that is necessary for our whole globe, our whole world. We might currently believe that this energy derives from military or economic force, but that is not so. It lies in the ideas and poetics of how we organize the world.

Continents weigh us down. They are thick and sumptuous. Archipelagos are able to diffract, they create diversity and expansiveness, they are spaces of relation that recognize all the infinite details of the real. Being in harmony with the world through archipelagos means inhabiting this diffraction, while still rallying coastlines and join- ing horizons. They open us to a sea of wandering: to ambiguity, to fragility, to drifting, which is not the same as futility.

Obrist
And you see the archipelago, this structure of islands, as the foundation of the community of the future?

Glissant
Yes. The community that we have before us is no longer my community or yours, it’s the community of the world. That’s the new focal point of our future. That’s what I call globality, mondialité.

Obrist
You oppose globality to globalization and the desire to create conformity amongst all the world’s cultures.

Glissant
Globality does not homogenize culture. It produces a difference from which new things can emerge. Globality equips us to combat globalization, which, as you say, standardizes and dilutes. Globalization reduces communities to a single model, attacking them from the top down, diminishing them. So we need a sense of a world community, of globality, or we cannot combat globalization.

Obrist
This is what led me to your writing: the understanding that it’s not by cutting ourselves off that we combat the uniformity of globalization.

Glissant
Not only is cutting ourselves off the wrong approach, but it is bound to fail. Think of the “anti-globalists” in France, who had to regroup to combat the course of globalization—they transformed into “alter-globalists.” They understood that it wasn’t the idea of the world that needed to be combatted, but the mode of organization of the world—and that, as a result, if we are “alter-,” we don’t simply oppose something and cut our- selves off from the world, but search for an alternative, and then we have the means to combat uniformity, the stranglehold of capitalist markets, etcetera.

Obrist
Has anyone succeeded yet, do you think?

Glissant
There are separatist movements that give rise to globality. The indigenous people of Chiapas who fight for their recognition, they don’t want an indigenous Mexico, they want a creole, or mixed, Mexico, they want to be part of the mix. They want an archipelago, “a world of many worlds” in their own words. This shows that from a political angle, the communities that defend themselves already have a sense of the diversity of the world.
They are unlike the decolonial movements of Africa, which could not escape European conceptions of identity and sovereignty. With the exception of Nelson Mandela’s, all ended in catastrophe and show precisely why the diversity of the world must be harnessed when we fight against various forms of oppression.

Obrist
I think this kind of diversity is what you call creolization. You wrote in L’imaginaire des Langues that creolization is “an infinite process.” How so?

Glissant
Creolization is the means by which several distinct cultures, or their elements, come into contact in a particular place in the world. It results in some- thing unexpected, completely unpredictable, born out of the encounter of their heterogeneous elements. In this way, it’s just like the Creole language.

Creolization is necessary, we agree, because our actual world is a mixed one—it is entangled.

The world is inextricable. At the same time, we need to confront a fact: our location is inescapable. Place is crucial. We are not floating in the air. So you cannot stay in the United States, here, and think that you are apart from the world. But you also cannot think that the world is here, in the United States only, and you are in the world. Really, the world is in me and I am in the world. The world is mixed.

Obrist
But what kind of mixing? What kind? It interests me that you also identify a negative kind of mixing.

Glissant
The negative kind is the most easy to see: the terrible mixity of financial and economic inter- ests that is the same as that of the colonizer and colonized, by which the powerful and rich, in the rich countries of the world, exploit the poor, in poor countries, the pauvres. These are the relationships that have shaped, and continue to shape, the world. The situation of Africa, today, is the great scandal of our time. We all know that, and we all know that it is the consequence of colonialism. This legacy, this mixity of colonialism and finance, is easy to conceive and to analyze. Why? Because this kind of mixity always has a predictable result. It is a mechanical mixing.
On the other hand, the encounters, the conflicts, the harmony, the symbiosis, the love, the hate of cultures in the world—when they produce something new, that is what I call creolization. Creolization, the hybridity of cultures and not only of organisms, is a métissage with a product inattendu— an unexpected result.

Let’s take jazz music, for example. People created it, and all the music of the world altered it, rock ’n’ roll, etcetera, came from that. And this is an unex- pected product of creolization.

Creolization is not a state of identity. It is a process that never stops. When I say the entire world is creolizing that doesn’t mean the world becomes Creole like me—a Creole from the Caribbean. Some of my friends in the Caribbean have taken my ideas of creolization and formulated a theory of créolité. And créolité is a kind of definition of what a Creole is in the Caribbean. But I’m not concerned with what a Creole is in the Caribbean. What is im- portant for me is creolization in the world. And that’s what we can have, you and me, together [fingers touch]. That is what I mean by creolization and we are lost without it.

Obrist
And so, what is there to do? Do you believe there is potential for the creolization of cultures and places in our world today, outside of globalization?

Glissant
Take the United States as a whole culture. I think that the United States may be one of the greatest places in the world because it has the possibility of creolization. But this has not yet come to pass, not today. It is a container for many ethnic- ities, but rarely do they inter- act. There are Black people, Italians, Germans, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Chicanos, Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, but none mixes with the others. It’s not a land of mixity and creolization—

Obrist
This is the difference between multiculturalism and creolization.

Glissant
Yes. You can say it’s a multiethnic community, but not a Creole one. These cultures are there, present. But creolization is not. In the Caribbean, in Brazil, you have creolization—cultures where elements from all over the world mix to create some- thing unexpected—but not in the United States.
What is the community that is the United States? The community exists in the Constitution, the flag, the Founding Fathers, and the President. That’s what links all these groups and, paradoxically, it’s an ideology of root identity. It does not enter into the infinite possibilities of Relation.
I think this country can be a great country—not because of its financial or political or military power—all of that can vanish from today to tomorrow, like the power of the Soviet Union, which vanished in one day. All of that can vanish. But what will not vanish is the possibility for a country to be for the first time a real country of creolization.