Product details
- ISBN 9780813955650
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 14 Sep 2026
- Publisher: University of Virginia Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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A groundbreaking feminist and decolonial reading of Édouard Glissant
Forces of Creolization reads Édouard Glissant's poetic and philosophical work through a feminist, decolonial lens, foregrounding creolization as a force of resistance, relationality, and submerged becoming. Drawing on Caribbean poststructuralism, Black feminist thought, and Global South epistemologies, Ruthanne Soohee Kim unveils a method of reading Glissant that centers diffraction, opacity, and errantry—not merely as metaphors but as political and poetic strategies.
Reading Glissant alongside Luce Irigaray, Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, and Kamau Brathwaite, Kim shows how creolization resists colonial genealogies, racial essentialism, and patriarchal closure. With her close readings of Glissant's novels, essays, and theoretical writings, Kim theorizes the abyss, the open boat, and the Medusing shoreline as sites where historical trauma becomes creative insurgency. Here, chaos, revolt, and carnival emerge as generative forces of world-making. Forces of Creolization offers an interdisciplinary framework for rethinking kinship, identity, and futurity, and contributes a necessary feminist aperture to Caribbean thought.
Ruthanne Soohee Kim is Director of CARE at St. Cloud State University and Equity Coordinator with Minnesota State. She is the coeditor of Horizons of Difference: Rethinking Space, Place, and Identity with Irigaray.
