Glissant is probably best known for his elaboration of concepts such as Relation, diversity, opacity, creolization and ‘rhizomatic’ identity, which all revolve around a respect for cultural difference. The more recent versions of these, from Poétique de la Relation onwards, have been influenced by the work of Deleuze, and in particular Deleuze and Guattari's Mille Plateaux. But, alongside his writing on the politics of identity, Glissant has throughout his work shown a profound interest in places or (since most of them are rural) landscapes. This is an intense personal engagement which goes back to his infancy; in the section of La Cohée du Lamentin entitled ‘Contestation du Morne, des Fonds et du Delta: Première vue des paysages’ he recounts how at the age of four weeks he was carried by his mother from the hills of Bezaudin down to Le Lamentin on the coast of Martinique, and describes his improbable conviction that he can actually remember the journey (p. 89) and his sense that ever since ‘ces paysages se sont présentés à moi […] comme des symboles vivants ou, plus audacieusement, comme des catégories de l’étant’ (p. 91). This intimate relationship with landscape informs all his novels; indeed, in ‘Le Roman des Amériques’, he claims that a key difference between European literature and that of the Americas and the Caribbean is that ‘Pour nous, l’élément formellement déterminant dans la production littéraire, c'est ce que j'appellerais la parole du paysage’ (DA, p. 255, italics original). Landscapes speak, in other words, and form a structural element of our being.

Places have always played a role in Glissant's overall network of Relation. But Une Nouvelle Région du monde is the first text to elaborate a specific connection between place or landscape on the one hand and, on the other, difference, which had previously been seen largely as a sociocultural phenomenon. That is, Glissant now articulates a new ‘aesthetic’ which, unlike his earlier ‘poetics’, covers both literary texts and the visual arts, and which both emerges out of the relationship between artist/writer and landscape and is based on difference. This entails producing a more explicitly theorized conception of difference that is influenced by, albeit not entirely congruent with, Deleuze;…