“Nothing You Don't Want”

Abstract In recent years, scholars have offered two different accounts of opacity's uses as counter to transparency's violence in Édouard Glissant's oeuvre. One group describes opacity as offering temporary relief within extant conditions. Another describes opacity as the foundation for more liberatory governances and socialities. This essay confirms both accounts but adds that the uses of both opacity and transparency depend on the relation in which each emerges. On this basis, the article argues that consenting relations afford both opacity and transparency the potential to create a more radical alternative to the present. This essay returns to the French of Glissant's Caribbean Discourse and Poetics of Relation and to translations of the word consentir to foreground relation's partial constitution of opacity and transparency in Glissant's work. To clarify and elaborate consent and its mutual constitution with coercion, this article then turns to Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1976), a novel whose form foregrounds the ways in which relation partially determines the uses of the other's opacity or transparency. The article provides a clearer account of the kinds of representation — transparent or opaque — valorized in Jones's novel. It also clarifies Glissant's account of consent, relation, and the function of opacity and transparency.