Britton's introduction presents a book that shifts without warning between registers - memoir, poetry, polemic, literary criticism - and coheres through a small number of insistent ideas: Relation, diversity, and the refusal of any single universal measure.

Glissant reads widely and unevenly on purpose, moving between major French writers, obscure ones, and founding texts of Asian and Arabic traditions, and takes an equal interest in computing and audiovisual technique for having reset the old division between speech and writing. He prefers islands and archipelagos to continents, holds that culture is inescapably political, and is scathing about multinational companies both for exploiting the poor and for dissolving the very idea of place.

Other passages are concrete proposals: an ecological plan to reclaim Martinique, a scheme of refuge towns for persecuted writers. Alongside them run adolescent memories of Martinique under wartime privation and of the dissidents who slipped away to fight, and an account of how medieval multiplicity hardened into classical universality.