Seeking on papers about opacity in contemporary literature and art for a panel at ASAP (Association for the Study of Arts of the Present) 2026 Convention. Please send an abstract and a short bio to Sané Bhattarai (bhattsan@gvsu.edu) or Moya (Moyang) Li (moyang.li@csulb.edu) by April 24.

Across his oeuvre, the Martinican poet-philosopher Édouard Glissant theorizes opacity as a form of resistance to the Western colonial demand for the transparency of the Other. Opacity figures in his writings as a linguistic strategy, an ethical value, and a political right – the right to not be fully understood. While Glissant provides several concrete examples of the former two, the latter remains largely speculative, operative only as a poetic description. Traditional politics, in the liberal tradition, demands transparent identities to deliberate and mobilize effectively. Glissant, however, imagines a political community that not only tolerates the opaque, irreducible difference of each of its members but also enshrines opacity as the very basis of legitimate belonging. What would such a community look like in practice? How would its members communicate and coordinate with one another to make political decisions, and to act collectively? Would such a community have to radically reform – or deform – our understanding of politics and of political life?

This panel invites papers that consider how arts of the present give sensuous form to Glissant’s political imagination, how they figure political communities predicated on the foundational right to opacity.

Possible themes include but are not limited to:

• Cross-disciplinary notions of opacity in Black studies, Caribbean studies, postcolonial studies, modernist studies, etc.

• The Caribbean’s privileged vantage on opacity as an aesthetic and/or political practice

• Tensions between the singular, the general, and the universal in collective politics

• The opacity of non-human and more-than-human worlds

• Adjacent concepts in Glissant’s oeuvre, such as relation, detour, errantry, creolization, counter-poetics, and open totality

• Adjacent concepts in literary criticism, such as ambiguity, vagueness, non-legibility, unverifiability, etc.