När de döda talar - om Édouard Glissants Monsieur Toussaint och det förflutnas relation till framtiden

Abstract

In the preface to his play about the Haitian Revolution, Monsieur Toussaint, Édouard Glissant writes that what he has attempted to express with the play is ”a prophetic vision of the past.” The purpose of this thesis is to explore how the relationship between the past and the future can be read in and through Glissant’s play. Thus, the problematic of the past is at the heart of this thesis. To achieve this purpose, the main questions I pursue are: how does Glissant mobilize history as a poetical and critical-political category in his representa¬tion of the past and the Haitian revolut¬ion? What relationship can be read between the dead – the past and history – and the fu¬ture? And, finally, in what ways can these questions about the dead and the past be related to wider con¬tempo¬rary discussions of history, inheritance and community? To answer these questions I read Monsieur Tous¬saint in-between the aesthetical text, the historical archive and an explicitly theoretical dis¬course. Doing so, I set in motion and relate the play to the work of Paul Ricœur and Achille Mbembe. Among my re¬sults is to be found the ethical-political imperative of establishing the necessary conditions for an approach with regards to the past that enables talking to the dead and answering to the ghost.