Glissant, Édouard (1928—2011) Caribbean writer and critical theorist. He is best known as one of the principal architects behind Creoleness, the movement to celebrate the cultural, ethnic, and political heterogeneity of the Caribbean. This heterogeneity is born of a fusion of the cultures African slaves brought with them to the so-called ‘New World’ and the culture and languages of their masters (predominantly, English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese). Neither the culture of the master nor the culture of the slave survived this interaction intact; both were transformed. In his theoretical writings he acknowledges the influence of Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, especially their concept of the rhizome. Interestingly, as Gilroy, Paul notes in his book The Black Atlantic (1993), this connection to Deleuze and Guattari has been erased from some of the English translations of his work. Gilroy speculates this may be in an effort to preserve a certain kind of nativism. For Glissant, the rhizome is a powerful and apt image for Caribbean culture---it may appear unified and coherent on the surface, but beneath the surface there is an incredible tangle of roots and origins that give it its rich character. Creole culture, the product of this rhizomatic root structure, is therefore inherently plural, according to Glissant, a fact that needs to be remembered in the face of certain nationalist and racist movements that extol the virtues of a singular cultural origin (whether it be that of the colonial master or that of some putative African past). For this reason, Glissant was opposed to the concept of négritude extolled by Senghor, Léopold and Césaire, Aimé, but he did not reject it outright. Rather he saw the concept of creole as completing it by enabling the celebration of black identity as it actually is today, as opposed to a kind of melancholic longing for a past and inevitably fantasized identity. The interweaving of dreams and reality is a powerful theme in Glissant’s work. Glissant is the author of several novels as well as collections of poetry and essays. He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992, the year in which fellow Caribbean poet Derek Walcott won it, but unfortunately did not live long enough to win it himself.