Dash offers the first book-length study of Glissant's whole output and reads it as one sustained project carried on in several genres at once. Poems, novels, plays and essays are treated together and in sequence, from Un champ d'iles and Les Indes through La Lezarde and Le quatrieme siecle to Le discours antillais and Poetique de la relation. The organising claim is that Glissant slips the categories critics reached for in his early years, negritude, surrealism and francophonie, because the ancestors he claims are Faulkner, Saint-John Perse and Victor Segalen, and because he wants to dissolve the heroic authorial self into a collective voice. Dash traces the movement from a Martinican landscape read as buried history, through the theory of Antillanite, to a poetics of chaos and Relation that turns outward to the Americas. He presents Glissant's later thinking as the shaping force behind the Creolite writers who followed him.