Ref. :  000001877
Date :  2001-10-01
langue :  Anglais
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Islands

Islands

Source :  Khal Torabully


The island is often represented as cut off from the world. But its thought is an archipelago. For it is related to and in connection with the other and the world. The continent has often or always created a flow of unilateral, or even monosemic exchange, with the island, for history dictates that it is the continent that discovers the island. Which means imposes its discourse on it. The island is the vessel of the continent. Some, as if to break this spell, affirmed that the island is the continent’s soul mate, its double or an extension of it, in some way. Certainly, seen by the islander, ‘globalisation’ is above all connection, aiming to created a network for exchange, primarily, it is true, for goods. For nobody is fooled : ‘globalisation’ in its ultraliberal version uses discourse to create utopia from a utopia, in order to more effectively empty it of substance and to make it a driving belt for market values.

The island, when it speaks most distinctly ( I am thinking about Derek Walcott, Caryl Philips, Edouard Glissant…), demolishes the discourse of great continental centers, living on the fringes of the decision making cities of the new world order. This is the supreme act of its presence in the world, of its identity. The island, through this intuitive penchant which results from its relationship with the world and beings, is a cockpit of speech, which
corrupts and also revitalises speech.

In archipelical thought, what is at work, is the surprise of meeting, of relating. There is no meaning that impoverishes or arranges contact between two realities, two spaces, even if a hoard of experts and island technocrats relay the network home. Here, emphasis is placed on the very process of relating, with unimaginable forms and creations. Parole is at work here, in what in it is the least controllable and the richest in connection. It is true that this paradigm counts less in regulated, monetized commercial exchange, to eradicate the unforeseeable as much as possible. But it is effective when the commercial cracks under the force of consumer and producer fever, who advocate a global citizenship in opposition with the trade organised by dominant powers, the first danger of which is standardisation of tastes and habits.

Meaning that here appears a militancy of the “unreasoned”, of the variety of products, of the intuitive as gage of an individuality which resists the danger of homogenisation of the human, increasingly being emptied of its identity, each day becoming the genetic map or the genome...

This is where the archipelago, with its abundance of differences collected together, networked, shows itself capable of awakening new creations founded on all kinds of particularisms. In this sense, ‘new citizenship’ will be archipeligarised. What is great about archipeligarisation, is that these particularisms, instead of being in opposition with each other, align themselves to create a ‘globalisation’ of ‘non-globalisation’. At the same time, despite being open, it retains a degree of isolation, of refraction, of mystery, which distances it from modelisation, the real virus of ‘globalisation’.

Islanders are, through their position in thought, in History, correctors of monosemism, for their speech must, at some point or another, define itself vis-à-vis language and an ambient ideology firmly attached to putting the centres of reasoning of the continents into perspective. Melting pot of variety, differences, discourse that used , not so long ago, to be seen as subversive, discourse taken up by all minorities ( including certain tutelary powers damaged by the American giant), where particularisms are standard, “the French exception’, itself having become one of the spearheads of all exceptions.

Does the continent anxious to protect its flavours, find at last its soul mate in the island through ‘globalisation’ ?



(This article synthesises a longer study by the same author. It can be found in French at the following address : Iles et Mondialisation)


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