Introduction: ‘L'imprévisible’: the philosophy of the unforeseeable

In 2011, Édouard Glissant shared with the journalist Fréderic Joignot his observation on the fluidity of Europe's borders and its Archipelagean Becoming. Bringing Europe closer to the epistemic grounds of ‘Antilleanity’ (Glissant, 1981; Wynter, 1989), Glissant discusses this latter not as a Caribbean singularity but as a forceful episteme (Wynter, 1989), through which the world can be thought in the Gestalt of creolization. This understanding of creolization introduces us to a notion of ‘living together’ departing from a critical race and decolonial perspective (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2010). Although creolization emerges within the semantic context of racial classification, it goes beyond it by opening the possibility of thinking the fuzziness and uncertainty of mixing. As Glissant (1996, 18–19) notes in Introduction à une poétique du divers :

Creolization represents the ‘unforeseeable’, a new way of thinking. It engages with new ways of understanding the world as relational and interconnected. Although creolization emerges from the specific historical context of the Caribbean, marked by colonialism, slavery, indentured labor and imperialism, for Glissant it represents a universal proposal for ‘Tout-monde ’ (Glissant, 1997a, 2010).