Who is Édouard Glissant from the nonfiction book, Just Us: An American Conversation?

Édouard Glissant was a 20th-century West Indian writer whose work Rankine discusses in "liminal spaces i." She provides a passage from an interview between Glissant and Malian writer Manthia Diawara, during which Glissant considers the effects of diaspora on people whose lineage can be traced to Africa. In response to Diawara's reference to the slave trade, Glissant says, "It's the moment when one consents not to be a single being and attempts to be many beings at the same time. In other words, for me every diaspora is the passage from unity to multiplicity" (30). Rankine uses the beginning of this quote—"consents not to be a single being"—as a phrase that represents acts or statements of racism in which an individual black person is viewed as representative of all black people.