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Caribbean Globalizations explores the relations between globalization and the Caribbean since 1492, when Columbus first arrived in the region, to the present day. It aims to help change prevalent ways of thinking, not only about the Caribbean archipelago as a complex field of historical enquiry and cultural production, but also about the nature of globalization. It argues that the region has long been – and remains – a theatre of conflict between, as well as a site of emergence for, different forms of globalization. It thereby offers the opportunity to focus research and debate across the interdisciplinary spectrum by reflecting upon and re-imagining the idea of globalization in a specifically Caribbean context. It does so at a time when the Caribbean is urgently rethinking its own identity and place in a world where the Western economic model of globalization is more in question than ever. With contributors including Patrick Chamoiseau, Christopher Miller, Mimi Sheller and Charles Forsdick, this book will be required reading for all scholars working in Caribbean Studies.

Depuis ces Archipels que j'habite, levés parmi tant d'autres, je vous propose de penser cette créolisation.Édouard GlissantImagine, if you will, a chain of islands in a varying sea that separates the islands as it links them. Then picture this chain as the first of many. You might like to reflect exactly what you have just called to mind. Was it the archipelagos of the Caribbean? Or was it the globe that we inhabit?Perhaps you pictured first the one and then the other. If so, your mind's eye made the aerial journey initiated by the sentence that figures as the epigraph to this essay. In that sentence, taken from his Traité du Tout-monde (1997), Édouard Glissant uses the image of the archipelago initially to characterize the region of the Caribbean, from where he writes, and then to gesture towards a globe made up of a myriad Caribbeans all engaged in the cultural process characteristic of the region, namely, creolization. Glissant reveals in this sentence the distinct and influential contribution of his late non-fictional work to contemporary Caribbean discussions of the global. He sums up that contribution in a proposition as arresting in French as it is hard to translate into English: ‘Le monde entier s'archipélise et se créolise’ (Glissant, 1997: 194). Glissant connects the two processes he says the whole world is undergoing by twinning them here as the main verbs of his sentence. It is a Caribbean archipelago that we see going global, here and elsewhere in his late work, and it is an archipelago of the mind as much as of the mind's physical environment. In both the Traité and the work of poetics that follows it in the same series, La Cohée du Lamentin (2005), Glissant uses the archipelago to characterize a way of thinking that reflects the creolizing of the world: ‘Le Monde tremble, se créolise […] La pensée archipélique tremble de ce tremblement’ (Glissant, 2005: 75–76). Archipelagic thinking embraces a vision of humanity as a diverse totality or what Glissant (2005: 76), quoting Montaigne (1992: III.2 (‘Du repentir’), 805), calls ‘la forme entière de l'humaine condition’ [‘the entire form of the human condition’]. This is a global vision that always starts, for Glissant (2005: 50), from a vantage point in his home island, Martinique, in the heart of the Caribbean archipelago.

Based on the influential Oxford Amnesty Lectures, this volume examines the forces shaping urbanization today and the divisions that threaten the world's cities. It consists of essays by eight leading urban thinkers and practitioners. Many contemporary issues are addressed, including the impact of globalization and migration on cities, the consequen.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the je-ne-sais-quoi through its history and its pre-history. When we are moved by something we cannot identify, but whose effects we cannot fail to recognize, how should we try and come to terms with our experience? The je-ne-sais-quoi rises to prominence as a keyword in such discussions during the period studied. This thesis offers the first full-length study of the word and its significance to literary and philosophical writing of that period. It traces its precursors, its rise as a noun in mid-seventeenth-century France and England, and its fall from grace. Previous historical work has generally restricted the word's application to aesthetics; this study examines its significance in the philosophy of nature and the passions as well as culture. It combines historical method and philosophical enquiry to inform the close analysis of examples. The aim is to consider what the je-ne-sais-quoi is and how it finds expression in writing. A fourfold thesis is proposed, (i) The lexical je-ne-sais-quoi, in its core meaning, refers to an inexplicable force with sudden and vital effects, (ii) This force remains ever on the move by unsettling sedimented words, passing through current ones, and abandoning these as they too undergo sedimentation, (iii) The word history of the je-ne-sais-quoi,/em> encapsulates this movement. The term is first used to unsettle its semantic precursors (by Descartes and others), becomes current in writing of the mid-seventeenth century (that of Corneille and Pascal in particular), but soon settles into the sediment of polite culture (as Méré, Bouhours, and English Restoration comedy show), (iv) Returning the word to the mobile non-substantival forms of its pre-history in Montaigne, to whom a chapter-length study is devoted, uncovers a form of writing that captures the force of the je-ne-sais-quoi better than the settled word itself. The task of literature is to lend form to the je-ne-sais-quoi by naming it in its inexplicable reality and by describing how it falls, like a disaster, into our experience.