Essays written over two decades set out a Caribbean poetics against both the totalizing claims of Western historiography and negritude's backward gaze toward Africa. Martinique, absorbed into France as an overseas department, is Glissant's extreme case: a place of what he calls nonhistory, where the dates that organize the record — abolition, the franchise, departmental status — were all settled elsewhere, and where the ruin of local production has left imitation as the only identity on offer.

Against this he proposes antillanité, a Caribbeanness founded on relation rather than descent. Creolization, not ancestry, is the region's governing process, and its emblems are the maroon's flight from the plantation, the carnival crowd, the whole forest rather than the single commanding tree.

Wandering away, in his terms diversion, counts for nothing unless reversion completes it by carrying people back to the point of entanglement, where the work must be done or they perish.