In this article, I briefly sketch the “right to opacity” that Édouard Glissant details in Poetics of Relation and situate it as an ethical imperative with Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, contrasting the distinctive contributions of opacity and ambiguity toward ethical-political living. I apply the principles of opacity and ambiguity toward one of Beauvoir’s most political and only co-written works, Pour Djamila Boupacha. I argue that the polyvalent use of the Islamic veil during the Algerian War for Independence reveals (...) the ethical application of opacity and ambiguity. Additionally, the veil clarifies the political stakes of gendered assumptions and racial hierarchy across geographies, positing a false body neutrality that obfuscates the violent global War on Terror. (shrink)

This article brings Édouard Glissant's theory of creolization into critical conversation with Luce Irigaray's sexuate difference theory and suggests creolization as a process capable of reconfiguring place and origin. Such a creolized conception, the article suggests, fissures narratives of legitimacy, possession, and lawful order, pseudo-claims utilized to dismiss antiracist protests. The article traces Irigaray's critique of woman as place and origin with her conception of the interval. It examines how Glissant's analysis of the womb-abyss clarifies and strategically obscures racialization as (...) an ongoing lacuna in Western thought. By deploying a rhizomatic network of relayed traces, the essay examines Glissantian notions of chaos, trembling, and detour to articulate sociopolitical movements that reveal and undermine the sexual economy of the neo-Plantation. Both thinkers, the author suggests, bring together place, origin, and movement to construct two radically different but strategically valuable theories that have yet to be put in a sustained, critical conversation. By positioning each theorist within their own framework, discourse, and socio-ethical concerns, the author offers ways that creolization and sexuate difference theory clarify issues contemporary American feminism tends to gesture toward as “intersectional” issues of gender, sex, and race. (shrink)