At present, Edouard Glissant's eminence not only in French Caribbean literature but in Caribbean literature as a whole is undisputed. There is also evidence of his emerging status as a theorist whose concepts and terminology have gained widespread acceptance. The use of such terms as opacité, détour and relation is increasing as these notions have become the investigative tools of literary critics as well as of those whose concerns are anthropological, sociological and linguistic. Since one of the distinctive features of Glissant's work is the fusion of the imaginative and the theoretical, it comes as no surprise that his influence should transcend the narrowly literary. This is especially so given the present theoretical context of post modernism and the general interest in cultural diversity that Glissant's ideas seem to have anticipated.

No one initially seemed to know quite what to make of Glissant and his work. He offered a bewildering range of ideas at a time when surrealism, negritude and francophonie were the dominant movements. He was neither exclusively poet, novelist, dramatist nor essayist but creatively combined all categories, often simultaneously. This at least partly accounts for the early difficulty in assessing Glissant's significance and in establishing his literary and ideological credentials. For instance, Gaëton Picon in his Panorama de la nouvelle littérature francaise (1960) presents Glissant as a Marxist because of the latter's apparent criticism of European expansion and his sympathy with the dominated peoples of the Caribbean in his epic poem Les Indes (1956).