Four lectures and six interviews, arranged so that Glissant's central preoccupations arrive in the middle of conversation rather than in formal exposition. Creolization, langage, and the distinction between atavistic and composite cultures are among the topics covered, along with culture and identity.

Because Glissant is working against other people's positions throughout, the material is unusually approachable without the range of his concerns narrowing.

Davis takes up a question decolonial thought usually approaches with suspicion: whether the language of human rights is any use to people trying to change how wealthy societies live. He grants the objections at length. The 'human' of human rights was invented by Christian Europe; responsibility has been repackaged as development and as justification for military intervention; corporations recast structural harm as an individual carbon footprint.

Borrowing Stuart Hall's account of ideological terrain, he answers that rights remain the moral vocabulary in which enormous numbers of people actually reason, and so can be rearticulated rather than abandoned. His anchor is Glissant's claim to a right to opacity, from which he draws duties: joining coalitional protest of the kind gathered at Standing Rock in 2016, then reconsidering food, work, clothing, travel and kinship.

A final chapter on Du Bois's own retreat from rights language marks where the strategy stops working.

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.

Coombes takes Poetics of Relation as the hinge of Glissant's career and the starting point of this study, arguing that the 1990 book marks a genuine break with the earlier theoretical writing, and that everything Glissant produced afterwards elaborates rather than departs from the paradigm it set.

Much of the work is exposition. Coombes lays out the interlocking neologisms, Relation and errantry among them, and the rhizomatic conception of identity borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari, explaining why Glissant refuses to derive identity from a single root. That refusal is grounded in the francophone Caribbean's history of forced migration, colonial rule and what Glissant saw as continued subordination. The concepts are presented as a loose system their author declined to systematize, and which he expected readers to assemble for themselves.

Coombes also reads Glissant against the market-driven globalization of the neoliberal decades, and defends him in later chapters from radical critics who find his thought politically useless.