The article is based on a lecture performance titled “Archipelagic Rehearsals – Abstract as Score” that was presented at the RGS-IBG conference, held jointly by the Royal Geographical Society and the Institute of British Geographers, in Cardiff in 2018. The presentation was an exploration of a possibility to practice, in Édouard Glissant’s terms, “archipelagic thinking” by presenting a lecture with interaction from the audience, as a lecture performance. That “archipelagic experiment” is continued in the article through an attempt to format the performance as an academic text. In turn, the text is an attempt to create new imaginaries and storytelling with Spanish slugs through participatory artistic experimental practice. The writing as artistic practice offers the potential for becoming and as such it is unpredictable in its outcome. The article starts with the author’s framing of Glissant’s poetics and attempts a feminist and more-than-human approach to present the event – the performance of the lecture and the story of the slug in footnotes that were an integral part of the lecture.

The article is based on a lecture performance titled “Archipelagic Rehearsals – Abstract as Score” that was presented at the RGS-IBG conference, held jointly by the Royal Geographical Society and the Institute of British Geographers, in Cardiff in 2018. The presentation was an exploration of a possibility to practice, in Édouard Glissant’s terms, “archipelagic thinking” by presenting a lecture with interaction from the audience, as a lecture performance. That “archipelagic experiment” is continued in the article through an attempt to format the performance as an academic text. In turn, the text is an attempt to create new imaginaries and storytelling with Spanish slugs through participatory artistic experimental practice. The writing as artistic practice offers the potential for becoming and as such it is unpredictable in its outcome. The article starts with the author’s framing of Glissant’s poetics and attempts a feminist and more-than-human approach to present the event – the performance of the lecture and the story of the slug in footnotes that were an integral part of the lecture.

Article: Review: Aiyejina, Funso. Earl Lovelace. University of West Indies Press, 2017. ISBN: 978-976-640-627-1. Pp. 114. Cloth $25.00

The outbreak of the 1791–1804 Haitian revolution shook the imperial powers of Europe and the U.S. Never before had the enslaved rebelled so powerfully, and in the decades to come, the name of the once-lucrative colony, Saint-Domingue, provoked anxiety and suspicion. In 2010, Western eyes again turned to Haiti as a devastating earthquake hit the island. Natural forces, together with poverty and inadequate infrastructure, caused a major humanitarian crisis.

Taking its point of departure in the intersection of politics and aesthetics, this special issue of Karib probes the global responses to these events and explores the repercussions within the frame of emergent and contemporary modernity.

Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn made famous the image of the Soviet prison system Gulag as an archipelago. In this paper, Solzhenitsyn’s idea of the Gulag archipelago is juxtaposed with French Caribbean writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant’s notion of archipelagic thinking. The focus is on the mining city Norilsk in Northern Siberia, one of the “islands” in this penal geography, a city that was largely built using forced labour. It is a long way from the Caribbean to Siberia, but both archipelagos (real and conceptual) share a history that can be termed colonial. While the system that created this penal archipelago of the Gulag was, in Glissant’s terms, a manifestation of thoroughly continental thinking, complete with grand, universalizing tendencies, it may also be possible to sense the diversity and interconnectedness that he attributed to the archipelago. The case of Norilsk is examined through the 2017 documentary A Moon of Nickel and Ice by Canadian film-maker Françoise Jacob. Glissant’s ideas are used to open up and pose questions, rather than to provide definitive answers. 

Fanon seems to have played an exceptional role in Scandinavia, and especially in Sweden. Last year's appearance of Göran Olson's documentary film Concerning Violence. Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self Defense, based on the first chapter of Les Damnés de la terre only goes to show that he is still highly relevant. This brief essay is a benning to map the presence of Fanon in Sweden in order to understand how and why he has been and still is a prevailing reference for academics, intellectuals and artists in the far North. Studying Fanon's presence involves various subjects and disciplines since it raises questions of how the Left has evolved, of how certain concepts are transposed from one language to another, from one context to another reality, depending on factors such as who introduced Fanon, through which channels and to what purpose. This is an essayistic pilot-study that will offer the reader a basic outline and a description of a phenomenon in what we may call a 'periphereal translation zone', which may contribute to decentering translation studies, and allow us to estimate the tremendous impact of Fanon in this region.

This article is an attempt at an interplay between Édouard Glissant’s archipelagic thinking, Marion Shoard’s edgeland and an imagined geography and history of a particular location and the people who have lived there. The town of Paldiski – the Baltic Port – bordering the Gulf of Finland, may be a remarkable Glissantian vantage point, and simultaneously an edgeland from which to draw attention to the creationand persistence of the ‘imaginaire’ that Glissant argued binds people as much as economic transactions. The port is both closed (as a military base or due to customs regulations) and open as a harbour. Thus, it frames all kinds of flows of peoples, materials and policies, yet it is on the edge literally and figuratively. In Paldiski, the imaginary seems independent of the physical environment, the past and future, and the people highlighted by the lifepaths of two historic figures.

This special issue of Karib includes authors with different disciplinary backgrounds in conversation with the Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) and with each other. Glissant has inspired and challenged us to use his essays and imaginary as a vantage point, a base from which to view the world and create the schema of belonging and relational rootedness. The focus is on how Glissant’s work continues to be interpreted in new ways in disciplines other than philosophy or literary studies and on exploring fundamental questions about physical spaces and their ‘imaginaries’ around the world. Glissant used diverse examples and terms, each drawing meaning from the others. The authors of this issue set out to do exactly that as they wander around the globe, drawing specific attention to certain points or to the process itself. The insularity of an island (literally and metaphorically) in Glissant’s writing is also a paradoxical globality: the wandering (errance) does not have a start or a finish. In this case, it seemed symbolically appropriate to set out from the Caribbean and return to it in the final paper of the collection.

La Traversée de la mangrove permet de présenter une articulation entre plusieurs voix narratives qui ont un point de vue et une relation à l’étranger qui vient de mourir, Francis Sancher. Si tous les personnages se sentent concernés par la mort de Francis Sancher, l’écriture révèle un traumatisme généalogique qui affleure dans les relations. L’article s’intéresse aux marques de style de Maryse Condé qui tournent autour de cette quête en utilisant les concepts élaborés par Henry Louis Gates en critique littéraire. La Traversée de la mangrove semble s’inscrire davantage dans les prolongements du mouvement de la négritude que ceux de la créolisation.