In the introduction to Le Discours antillais, Glissant describes the Antillean Départements d'Outre-Mer as being trapped in a contradictory fantasy of assimilation that cuts them off from any real knowledge of themselves as a community. On the one hand, the numerous uprisings which occurred from the seventeenth century onwards not only failed in their immediate aims but incurred such brutal repression that ‘il n'en est résulté chaque fois qu'une démission de plus en plus tracée de l’élan collectif, de la volonté commune qui seuls permettent à un peuple de survivre en tant que peuple’ (p. 15). On the other hand, the abolition of slavery and then departmentalization offered at least some of the people the ‘solution’ of an illusory participation in metropolitan French society and culture, so that ‘les Antillais sont ainsi conduits à se nier en tant que collectivité, afin de conquérir une illusoire égalité individuelle’ (p. 17).

In Le Discours antillais Glissant sees this absence of a collective identity as one of the fundamental social problems of the islands, and as both a cause and an effect of their political passivity and stagnation. In this situation, he argues, ‘cultural action’ assumes a particular importance; writers have a significant role to play in trying to develop a collective consciousness in the people (pp. 208–19). He insists that Antillean literature – unlike that of Europe – is a collective practice: ‘la parole de l'artiste antillais ne provient donc pas de l'obsession de chanter son être intime; cet intime est inséparable du devenir de la communauté’ (p. 439). It is the writer's responsibility to help the Martinican people achieve a sense of itself as a political and historical subject – a community that can act in its own name. For this to be effective, the collective subject must be constituted in the actual structures of the literary text; as well as being represented thematically, it must occupy the position of narrating subject: a collective narrative voice. However – and this is the whole point – this voice does not (yet) exist in social reality; the fiction has to create it.