SOURCE: Naylor, Paul. “Nathaniel Mackey: The ‘Mired Sublime.’” In Poetic Investigations: Singing the Holes in History, pp. 71-105. Evanston Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Naylor analyzes the cross-cultural nature of Mackey's works.

We are aware of the fact that the changes of our present history are the unseen moments of a massive transformation in civilization, which is the passage from the all-encompassing world of cultural Sameness, effectively imposed by the West, to a pattern of fragmented Diversity, achieved in a no less creative way by the peoples who have today seized their rightful place in the world.

—Edouard Glissant

Edouard Glissant's incisive sentence—which inaugurates a series of essays, first published in 1981, devoted to the possibilities and difficulties of a cross-cultural poetics—registers the rhetorical-political shift from sameness to diversity that structures so many of the current debates over multiculturalism. Although the Martinican poet and...