It is widely accepted that Glissant's thought undergoes a dramatic change of perspective and of mood in the late 1980s and early 1990s; that is, between Le Discours antillais (1981) on the one hand, and Poétique de la Relation (1990), Tout-monde (1993), Introduction à une poétique du divers (1996) and Traité du Tout-monde (1997) on the other. Le Discours antillais was, as its title suggests, exclusively concerned with the French Antilles, and in fact mainly with Glissant's own home island, Martinique; and it gave an extremely pessimistic evaluation of Martinique as a ‘morbid’, politically stagnant, alienated and isolated society. The major texts of the 1990s, in striking contrast, expand their focus to encompass the whole world, and are dominated by a far more up-beat, exuberant celebration of hybridity and cross-cultural contact. The emphasis here is on dynamism and change; Glissant takes the Caribbean phenomenon of creolization and – in a move that is emblematic of his whole shift of perspective – reworks it on a global level, as a force capable of endlessly generating new forms of culture and experience. Creolization becomes a supercharged, generative version of métissage: ‘le métissage sans limites, dont les éléments sont multipliés, les résultantes imprévisibles’ (PR, p. 46). This new position is encapsulated in the concept of the ‘Tout-monde’: the world envisaged as a multiplicity of communities all interacting and all aware of each other's existence: ‘Pour la première fois, les cultures humaines en leur semi-totalité sont entièrement et simultanément mises en contact et en effervescence de réaction les unes avec les autres’ (TTM, p. 23).

The ‘Tout-monde’ thus comes to stand as a kind of shorthand for a ‘good’ version of globalization: contact which not only preserves diversity but creates new forms of it. Globalization in the negative sense of ‘le règne des multinationales, la standardisation, l'ultra-libéralisme sauvage sur les marchés mondiaux’ cannot be resisted from a purely local standpoint; the first chapter of the Traité du tout-monde, entitled ‘Le Cri du monde’, argues eloquently that while it is necessary and important to fight to preserve one's own particular community, this must not preclude a more general awareness of and solidarity with other struggles across the world: ‘nous acceptons maintenant d’écouter ensemble le cri du monde, sachant aussi que, l’écoutant, nous concevons que tous l'entendent désormais’ (p. 17, italics original).