The Tout-Monde of disaster studies

Abstract

This essay expands the postcolonial agenda for future disaster studies that we suggested in conclusion of the book The Invention of Disaster. It provides some refined perspectives on how to capture the diversity and complexity of the world that we draw from the philosophy of Martinican poet and novelist Edouard Glissant. Glissant’s philosophy of creolisation and relation offers critical pathways towards pluralistic approaches to understanding what we call disaster in a world that is marked by hybridity and relationships rather than essentialism and nativism. A Tout-Monde, in Glissant’s terms, that is the combined additions of different and hybrid interpretations of disaster. Exploring the Tout-Monde of disaster studies will constitute a radical and forward-looking postcolonial agenda; radical in that it will challenge many of our scholarly assumptions, popular discourses as well as common-sense policies and practices.