This short film chronicles a 2009 series of interviews between the scholar and filmmaker Manthia Diawara and the Martinican author, literary theorist, and philosopher Edouard Glissant. Diawara conducts their conversations on the Queen Mary II in a cross-Atlantic journey from Southampton (U.K.) to Brooklyn (New York) as well as on the island of Martinique. During the discussions, Glissant explores his theoretical and philosophical trajectories, particularly his “theory of relation” which produced the concept of “Tout-monde” and was the genesis of his later work. Up to his death in 2011 Edouard Glissant was one of the most important contemporary theorists of “la francophonie,” and his seminal work, produced in the 1980s, contributed significantly to Francophone studies and cultural studies theories on creolization, ethnic diversity, and multiplicity. Many of the topics of conversations in this film are drawn from his Le Discours Antillais (1981), a study that greatly influenced cultural studies as rooted in multiculturalism and identity politics. Notably influenced by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, particularly their text Mille plateaux (1981), Glissant’s later work of the 1990s and early 2000s focused on developing his theory of the “Poétique de la relation,” wherein relation is conceived of as a rhizome with no beginning or end, only middleness between subjects, their movement fueled by the energy of difference and diversity. The concept of relation in the 1990s was the basis for his work Tout-monde (1991) and his last work, Philosophie de la relation (2009), in which Glissant seeks contemporary answers and new meanings for globalization, the failure of nations, socioeconomic disparity, political violence, and social injustice.

Diawara sets his film to the rhythm of “relation,” seguing through a series of “chapters” that feature Glissant’s philosophical, literary, and political observations. Moving from the first chapter, “The Sacred Memorial,” to “Atlantic Crossing,” “Jazz et métissage,” “DNA . . . ?” “The Creole Garden,” “Changing the Way We Think,” “Democracy,” “Petit pays: philosophie de la relation,” and “Frontiers and Walls,” Glissant offers fascinating commentary linking these disparate topics to theories on race, racial mixing, exile, diaspora, and violence in pre- and postcolonial contexts, and the chaos of our globalized world, to name just a few. “Every diaspora is a passage from unity to multiplicity. . . . This is true for everything in the world,” notes the philosopher. “Creolization is a sign of change. . . . [It means] that you can change with the other while staying yourself—you don’t lose because you are multiple—but no one wants to admit this.” For Glissant, understanding “roots and where we came from” is less important than finding ways of understanding “what keeps us together.” There is a logic in relation that, if understood, links the multiple in the one. “The tree is a genealogy that excludes the other. . . . I would draw a jungle or a forest, a collective, to better describe our relations between each other.”

For Glissant drawing a rhizome of connections is possible because we have “un imaginaire collectif” (a collective imaginary) that makes it possible, and this makes us able to “sentir” (feel) the world. “There aren’t just five continents and four races as previously thought, there are islands and multiple races, multiplicity comes out of this. . . .” Understanding this world of connections, he notes, was evident to other Martinicans—Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon—who, like him, always thought in terms of rhizomes and multiplicities. Their theories (Césaire’s négritude and Fanon’s “New Man”) are known all over the world. They didn’t limit themselves to thinking within the confines of one island during one time. They were borderless in terms of thinking of themselves and the philosophies and theories they promoted as connected with others, across the world.

Glissant notes that, indeed, it is often borders that hinder thinking and thinkers from coming into relation with others. In the last few minutes of the film he notes that “borders are inherently impenetrable, but paradoxically, they also often play the role of not letting people leave.” Whether a nation is large or small, if a country is not able to open its borders to a flow of people and ideas, then it stagnates and becomes fixed in time. Most telling, Glissant’s views on the economics of the world resonate profoundly in our era of global financial meltdowns: “Economic upheavals will be worse in large countries, rather than small because small have indigenous resources on which to rely. . . . Empires fall and are not eternal. The small entities that can rely on themselves have perhaps more of a future in the complexity of the world.”

Manthia Diawara’s documentary captures the essence of Glissant’s thought and his philosophy, which have helped our understanding of the interrelatedness of languages, ethnicities, geographies, and histories.