Common-Places: Édouard Glissant, Nadia Huggins, and the Poetics and Politics of the Deep

Abstract This essay questions how we might understand liminality and locatedness simultaneously through the theorist Édouard Glissant’s overlooked conception of the ‘common-place’. It does so through analysis of underwater photographs by Nadia Huggins. On one level, Huggins’ images are a study in transparency and the possibilities for visualising the self and the environment; on another, their circulation within art gallery environments activates possibilities for gathering Otherwise or hiding in plain sight. Glissant’s theoretical propositions have themselves been widely circulated within contemporary art making, curating, and analysis for the past twenty years. Challenging the frequent reduction of Glissant’s important concept of ‘opacity’ to liminality or placelessness, and demonstrating the ways in which visual practice can contain the shared and the specific simultaneously, this essay accounts for the combination of the poetic and the political that is intrinsic to Glissant’s theoretical project, and to the circulation of images associated with the Caribbean landscape.