Glissantian Ontology: Creolization and Race
Video Arts & Humanities 2025 Graduate ExhibitionPresentation by Andrew Domzal
Exhibition Number 505
Abstract
I argue, using the work of Édouard Glissant, that the ways in which we think concepts like culture, race, and even individual identity, must be fundamentally revised. In the first chapter, I establish Glissant’s vision of creolization which works to undermine the categories of ‘pure’ and ‘mixed’ and relay how this concept envisions a world that is perpetually becoming. In the second chapter I address how, while Glissant’s philosophical work is garnering new attention, some of the work mischaracterizes what Glissant means by creolization. I make the case for creolization not as a political methodology or a form of liberal multiculturalism, but as a claim about the primacy of becoming and the illusion of Being. From this position I argue, alongside Glissant, that understanding identity—be it cultural, racial, national, etc.—as static inevitably leads to hierarchical oppressive societies. Understanding identity as becoming is not only more accurate but also undermines the foundational ideological principles of those hierarchical societies. In the third chapter, I apply this Glissantian conception of creolization to the legal history of Virginia and the construction of Blackness. Rather than a fixed concept of race that laws are then built around, tracing the history of defining Blackness through the Virginia legal system shows instead a system attempting to retroactively respond to and reify a population constantly in motion. In conclusion, Glissant’s philosophy demands that ideas of fixed identity and purity be done away with in favor of a mutable understanding of identity rooted in difference and becoming.
Importance
My work addresses many commonly held beliefs about identity categories such as race and works to illustrate not only why current conceptions of identity as a fixed state lead to oppressive hierarchies but also how these conceptions fight against the current of the world rather than with it. I also make a critical intervention in the emerging field of Glissant scholarship in philosophy which I argue, so far, has misinterpreted his work as a direct political methodology rather than a much more complex ontology.
DEI Statement
My research deals directly with concepts of race and culture and specifically addresses the legal history of the concept of Blackness in the state of Virginia as well as the larger status of race as understood in the US context. Beyond that, my work addresses where ontologies centered on fixed understandings of Being begin to form exclusionary ethnostates. I specifically use the work of Glissant to identify and undermine that vision of ontology in favor of a mutable ontology of becoming. This vision calls for a fundamental reevaluation of the categories of race, culture, nationality, etc.