We begin the autumn with Martinican poet, philosopher and thinker Édouard Glissant’s ‘For Opacity’. The text challenges the demands of transparency placed on marginalized cultures, instead proposing opacity as a right – a way of holding on to difference without needing to explain or simplify it. “Must we endlessly translate ourselves in order to be understood?” Glissant asks, weaving together questions of identity, relation and colonial legacies.

The text can be found here: http://www.dougashford.info/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Glissant_For_Opacity.pdf