Rethinking Globalization: Edouard Glissant's Tout-Monde as a Diasporic Call towards Imaginary Wholelands

Since the theorization of his Antillanité, translated by Michael Dash as Caribbeanness, a concept in-between Negritude and Créolité, Glissant has embedded his revolutionary stance in his advocacy of "tout"[whole] to alert the world in its totality to rethink the current marginalizing phenomenon of globalization, which is not at all global either in theory or in practice. This paper analyzes Glissant's Tout-monde as an imaginary world of communion between the different "étants" of the world in the West and the Rest, the colonial and the postcolonial eras and areas. This presentation will particularly focus on his concept of the world, the power of the imaginary, and his poetics and politics of relational language through his theorization of "langue échomonde" [world echoing language], a perspective that accommodates the two main stances in the politics of language in postcolonial studies. The second part of the presentation discusses his socio-political vision of the Tout-monde through his praise of differences and his political notion of "mondialité"as an alternative to the dominant phenomenon of "mondialisation" [globablization] for a better world wherein each being breathes "l'oxygène du monde" [the oxygen of the world] as imaginatively expressed by Chamoiseau in his interview with Abdellatif Chaouite "Les guerriers de l'imaginaire" [The Warriors of the Imaginary].