Édouard Glissant: Resistance and Opacité

This article examines Édouard Glissant's notion of opacité and its interpretation by critics as a form of resistance to cultural appropriation. In doing so it asks to what extent opacité can be located within a postcolonial framework. Or, to put it another way, is Glissant's opacité a form of resistance that is specific to a territory that we can call postcolonial or is it more general? In teasing out this question, the article critically examines approaches to Glissant's work which, whilst always illuminating, tend to circumscribe opacité within specific contexts. The importance of contexts is acknowledged but, it is argued, opacité is active within transversal modes of poetic interpretation that Victor Segalen's work suggests and Glissant's thought elaborates. Opacité's resistance operates obliquely by both informing that which is culturally or psychically impenetrable, and opening it to its outside in a process of créolisation in which the elements of exchange are transformed in unpredictable ways. As such, Glissant's work could be located within a postcolonial territory but its logic would exceed the, albeit uncertain, limits of such a domain.