Like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant combined a passionate engagement in the politics of decolonization with analysis of the modes and structures of French colonialism, from its origins to its singular perpetuation in the form it has taken since 1946 as the so-called ‘departmentalisation’ of the former ‘colony’ of Martinique (as well as Guadeloupe and French Guiana). In this chapter, I wish to focus on a number of Glissant's most overtly ‘political’ texts, including his 1958 first novel La Lézarde, which tells the story of a group of young Martinican anticolonial militants circa 1946; the little-known 1961 Les Antilles et la Guyane à l'heure de la décolonisation, by some stretch Glissant's most radically anticolonial and Fanonian text; and his masterpiece of Caribbean critical theory, the 1981 Discours antillais.

La Lézarde, Glissant's first novel, established the young author as a prominent voice in Antillean letters when it won the French Prix Renaudot in 1958. Though frequently read as a militantly anticolonial text, the novel does not narrate the awakening of a Martinican national consciousness that would lead teleologically from alienation and exploitation to the birth of a decolonized nation. Rather, it advances an aporetic critique of such political triumphalism in the face of the eternal, inevitable resurgence of the mythic violence of the colonial order and plantation slavery. La Lézarde describes the decision of a group of young Martinican militants in the fictional city of Lambrianne to assassinate a political operative of the colonialist opposition. A sort of Antillean version of Sartre's Les mains sales, the novel is set in the time of the momentous 1945 elections that brought Aimé Césaire to power as the communist mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy to the French Assembly. The novel turns around the debates over the demands and ethics of left-wing political militancy in the post-war period. The young peasant Thaël, engaged in this assassination plot, ultimately ‘succeeds’, but the novel stages this political violence not as the triumph of Martinican national consciousness but rather as the resurgence of the atavistic, mythic violence of colonialism and plantation slavery itself.