1 0 1

Untimely Vision: Aimé Césaire, Decolonization, Utopia

Gary Wilder

I have no ambitions about finding a solution. I do not know

where we are going, but I know that we must charge ahead. The

black man must be liberated, but he must also be liberated from

the liberator.

— Aimé Césaire, Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai

I inhabit a three-hundred-year war.

— Aimé Césaire, “Lagoonal Calendar”

Freedom and History

In his lucid mediation on “the tragedy of colonial Enlighten-ment,” David Scott asks why scholars continue to produce Romantic narratives of anticolonial revolution when the politicohistorical framework within which such histories were once relevant has changed decisively. In an era when the Bandung project has collapsed, when the future of national sovereignty that it envisioned has

Public Culture 21:1 doi 10.1215/08992363-2008-023 Copyright 2009 by Duke University Press

i m a g i n i n g t h e h i s t o r i c a l p r o j e c t

This essay is drawn from my current book project tentatively titled “Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, Utopia.” For opportunities to present earlier versions of the essay at Harvard Uni-versity, Duke University, Northwestern University, the University of Missouri, and the New School, I thank my hosts Abiola Irele, Laurent Dubois, Tessie Liu, Mamadou Badiane, and Ann Laura Stoler. I am also grateful for comments on earlier drafts from Claudio Lomnitz, Paul Saint-Amour, the edito-rial board of Public Culture, and especially Laurent Dubois. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

Public Culture

1 0 2

receded into the past, Scott wonders, what is the political utility of producing more stories of colonialism that focus on overcoming and emancipation? He argues that the emancipatory hopes of a superseded anticolonalism are no longer adequate to illuminate the political impasses of our postcolonial predicament. Scott therefore calls on scholars to confront the disjuncture between the outmoded histories we continue to write, the altered problem space in which we live, and the postrevolu-tionary futures that we can now realistically anticipate. By developing these issues through an insightful reading of The Black Jacobins, C. L. R. James’s great histori-cal epic of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, Scott establishes the Caribbean as the paradigmatic space of colonial modernity.1

This radical challenge to postcolonial studies by one of the field’s most influen-tial practitioners demands our attention, not least because of its incisive formula-tion and far-reaching analytic implications. It also resonates with other calls by important critics to revise the stories we tell about anticolonialism.2 Thinking along with Scott, however, I would like to suggest that it is possible to accept his critique of revolutionary anticolonialism without concluding, as he does, that all stories of colonial emancipation must be replaced with stories of impossible alter-natives and tragic dilemmas.

Scott persuasively argues that traditional dreams of total revolution, politi-cal emancipation, and national sovereignty are ineffective antidotes to a form of power that can only be negotiated, and not overcome through acts of autono-mous agency and heroic resistance. This perspective leads him to gather together these distinct phenomena under the single rubric of “Romantic anticolonialism.” But once a chain of equivalence is established among colonial overcoming, anti-colonial revolution, political emancipation, and national sovereignty, it becomes impossible to challenge any one of these positions without also automatically dis-counting the others. The general possibilities of colonial overcoming and political emancipation are thereby reduced to a limited revolutionary nationalism. And because Scott understands the latter to have lost its political purchase today, he figures all histories of emancipation as Romantic. He thereby affirms, however inadvertently, the central assumption of the anticolonialism that is the object of his criticism — namely, that colonialism can be overcome and postcolonial free-dom secured only through a revolutionary nationalism whose objective is formal territorial sovereignty. Scott’s account thus rejects as outdated the very prospect

1. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).

2. See Achille Mbembe, “African Modes of Self-Writing,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 239 – 73; and Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

Untimely Vision

1 0 3

3. For Kosellek, in any given epoch there exists a historically specific relation between present and future that determines its sense of historical temporality as well, therefore, as the kinds of his-torical narratives that it produces. Reinhart Kosellek, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

4. Here I build directly on the insights about reified objects, emancipatory potentiality, and his-torical temporality in the work of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Ernst Bloch.

of colonial emancipation itself rather than the revolutionary and national forms through which it was pursued at a particular historical moment. In other words, it reproduces a historically specific logic of decolonization that naturalized the relationship between colonial emancipation and national liberation.

It is not clear that a constitutive understanding of colonial modernity requires a tragic understanding of colonial politics. Why should the options for thinking about postcoloniality be limited to choices between romance or tragedy, revolu-tion or impasse, emancipation or negotiation, salvation or impossibility? Such restrictive oppositions make it difficult to remember or recognize within decoloni-zation those movements or voices that struggled to institute forms of nonnational colonial emancipation. This framework obscures alternative histories of decolo-nization that challenged precisely the anticolonial nationalism whose ongoing relevance Scott rightly questions. Sharing Scott’s commitment to move beyond the historiography of revolutionary nationalism, this essay examines the kind of histories that his argument implicitly discounts: histories of colonial overcoming that are at the same time histories of negotiation with colonial modernity. Such discounted histories, I suggest, do in fact speak to the political demands of our postcolonial present.

This essay also endorses Scott’s claim that historical temporality should be a central concern of postcolonial scholarship. But it develops a different under-standing of the provocative notion of “futures past” that Scott adapts from the historian Reinhart Kosellek.3 For Scott, revolutionary anticolonialism’s dream of national sovereignty became a historically superseded and politically obsolete future past when it failed to secure political freedom for colonized peoples. Such a past future, he contends, can no longer meaningfully animate emancipatory projects in our radically transformed conditions. I am less concerned with future arrangements whose promise faded away after they were imperfectly implemented or with futures that corresponded to a world that no longer exists and to hopes that are no longer possible. Instead, my interest lies in futures that were once imagined but never came to be, alternative futures that might have been and whose not yet realized emancipatory possibilities may now be recognized and reawakened as durable and vital legacies.4

Public Culture

1 04

This essay focuses on Aimé Césaire’s post – World War II commitment to colo-nial emancipation without national independence. It examines how his constitu-tional initiatives to enact a future with France in an age of decolonization may be read as politically untimely and strategic utopian engagements with the complex problem of (colonial) freedom. I will suggest that they can be grasped as such only if we recognize that Césaire’s 1946 program to transform Antillean colonies into French departments and his subsequent attempt to reconstitute France as a federal republic were mediated by the spirits of Louverture and Victor Schoelcher and the legacies of the 1790s revolution in Saint-Domingue and the 1848 abolition of slavery. At these crucial turning points, imperial conditions had created the pos-sibility of nonnational colonial emancipation even as certain kinds of instituted liberty themselves obstructed the prospect of substantive freedom. For subsequent generations, such failed initiatives then became futures past that condensed not yet realized but ever-available emancipatory potentialities.

By revisiting Césaire’s discredited and outmoded projects for nonnational colo-nial emancipation, this inquiry seeks to reflect critically on openings within the postwar order that were foreclosed by a nationalist logic of decolonization. It also pays special attention to the layered histories and temporal condensations entailed in Césaire’s political interventions. And through reference to contemporary Mar-tinique it suggests how his vision in that opening may speak directly to the chal-lenges and opportunities of our postcolonial present. Finally, in light of his recent death, it raises the more general question of Césaire’s historical legacy.

The Problem of Freedom and the Time of Utopia

In his landmark study of postemancipation society in colonial Jamaica, the his-torian Thomas C. Holt figures the British abolition of slavery in 1833 as a “prob-lem of freedom.”5 He not only demonstrates that freedom for slaves immediately became a problem for powerful whites who could no longer directly compel emancipated black cultivators to work on plantations. Through his account of the coercive and restricted free labor regime actually instituted by emancipation, Holt also indicates that freedom immediately became a problem for former slaves as well. Abolition, we learn, marked the commencement rather than the conclusion of a modern form of colonial racism. Slave emancipation instituted a regime of freedom from which slaves would now struggle to be emancipated. In this essay

5. Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832 – 1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

Untimely Vision

1 0 5

I emphasize that freedom understood in this way is a long-term “problem” that reemerges forcefully at crucial turning points in the history of colonial emancipa-tion (i.e., the 1790s, 1848, 1945).

This refractory problem compelled Césaire, Schoelcher, and Louverture to develop self-reflexive and experimental approaches to colonial emancipation. They refused to presuppose the political forms through which freedom should be instituted. Such arrangements would have to be imagined, invented, and attempted in relation to existing and emergent conditions in any given conjuncture. A prag-matic spirit led them to use forms that worked and to move on when they were no longer effective. A utopian spirit led them to imagine unprecedented alternatives and to pursue the unimaginable concretely. Their examples illuminate a politi-cal orientation that we might call “strategic utopian.” Strategic utopia, as I try to develop the concept, entails concrete interventions that enact (envision, perform, pursue) and anticipate (precede, foresee, call forth) a transformative set of coordi-nates. This imagined alternative order appears to have no evident relation to actual conditions even as it is already immanently discernible and embodied, however fleetingly or spectrally, in existing consciousness, practices, or institutions.

Strategic utopia thus describes an antinomy between potentially transforma-tive acts that must in some way presuppose an already transformed world, on the one hand, and an envisioned transformation that could be realized only through such transformative acts, on the other. This seemingly irreconcilable opposition is mediated precisely by the concrete historical acts that I refer to as utopian. Act here should be understood in the triple sense of performance, action, and law or juridical intervention. Such acts are thus situated on the almost imperceptible line between the possible and the impossible, the actual and imagined, the existent and emergent, the immanent and transcendent — a boundary that is often both infinitesimal and impassable. Strategic utopia is not simply about claiming the impossible instrumentally to make moderate gains today. But it does indicate the political effectivity of acting “as if” — as if the future was imminent, as if a seem-ingly impossible order already existed — to rework existing coordinates (by antic-ipating alternative arrangements) and to bring forth “utopian” alternatives (by awakening immanent possibilities in the present). Here we see the indispensable temporal dimension of strategic utopia; such utopias are necessarily untimely.6

6. I thus seek to embrace the radical potential of political imagination while respecting Karl Marx’s critique of historically ungrounded and politically unmediated utopian fantasies. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: International, 1948), 39 – 42. This understanding of utopia resonates with, though differs from, more minimal or formal attempts

Public Culture

1 06

By untimely I mean out of sync with the corresponding historical period. Such actions and events are the kind of phenomena that Ernst Bloch refers to as “non-synchronous” and Kosellek as “the contemporaneity of the non-contemporane-ous.”7 This is not only a matter of something being outmoded or ahead of its time, of merely moving against the historical current. Nor do I use the term to refer only to the phenomenon of uneven historical development. Rather, untimely here indexes processes and practices of temporal refraction whereby people act “as if” they inhabit a different historical moment, whether intentionally, as part of a political strategy, or unconsciously, as symptom of a syndrome. Untimeliness here also refers to instances when conventional distinctions among past, present, and future become blurred, when disparate times are condensed within reified objects.8

Departmentalization as Decolonization

In the historical opening that followed France’s liberation from Nazi occupation, Césaire served in the French National Assembly as a Communist Party deputy from Martinique. There he participated in constitutional debates over the form of the French Union, the Fourth Republic’s new imperial order. He quickly became

to recuperate utopia as either the human capacity to imagine a radically alternative social totality (Adorno) or the valorization of political fantasy as such (Fredric Jameson). It also differs from Jacques Derrida’s conception of messianic waiting without expectation for a democracy to come that denigrates politics (as necessarily instrumental) and deifies ethics (transhistorically). Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch, “Something’s Missing: A Conversation between Ernst Bloch and The-odor Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing (1964),” in Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 1 – 17; Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (Lon-don: Routledge, 1994); Fredric Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia,” New Left Review, no. 25 (2004): 35 – 54.

7. Ernst Bloch, “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics,” New German Critique, no. 11 (1977): 22 – 38; Kosellek, Futures Past, 95, 237 – 46, 266.

8. Benjamin invites us to listen carefully for “a sort of theological whispered intelligence dealing with matters discredited and obsolete” (“Some Reflections on Kafka,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: Schocken, 1969], 144). Jameson points to the inverse pro-cess: “Utopias in fact come to us as barely audible messages from a future that may never come into being” (“The Politics of Utopia,” 54). Adorno writes that “our thinking heeds a potential that waits in the object” and also that “the interpretive eye . . . sees more in a phenomenon than what it is — and solely because of what it is.” His negative dialectics therefore entail “the penetration of . . . hardened objects” by means of “the possibility of which their reality has cheated the objects and which is none-theless visible in each one.” For Adorno, “cognition of the object in its constellation is cognition of the process stored in the object.” In this way, “the history locked in the object . . . is delivered” (Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton [New York: Continuum, 1983], 19, 28, 52, 163).

Untimely Vision

1 0 7

9. Journal officiel de la République française (hereafter JORF), Documents de l’Assemblée nationale constituante, February 26, 1946, 519.

10. In response to critics of his support for the 1946 law, Césaire repeatedly explained that departmentalization corresponded to the longtime wishes of the Antillean people and enjoyed broad public support in the postwar period, especially among Communists, workers, and civil service employees. It was opposed only by a minority of right-wing white békés. Césaire and his colleagues seized a historic opportunity to pass a radical anticolonial law in a brief opening when Martinican and French politics were dominated by Communist legislators. For an overview of Martinique dur-ing the postwar period, see Armand Nicolas, Histoire de la Martinique: De 1939 à 1971 (History of Martinique: From 1939 to 1971) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998).

identified with his cosponsorship of the March 19, 1946, law that established the so-called old colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guiana, and Réunion as formal departments of France. This act stipulated that all current and future metropoli-tan laws be applied to these French territories. The report to the assembly from the Commission des Territoires d’Outre-Mer presented by Césaire on behalf of Léopold Bissol, Gaston Monnerville, and Raymond Vergès argued that depart-mentalization was simply a matter of legal reclassification, “the normal outcome of a historical process” through which these colonies had already been effectively integrated into the French nation.9

The report explains, however, that private economic interests had obstructed this process of assimilation precisely when, after World War II, new labor leg-islation was passed. This meant that departmentalization, if implemented faith-fully, would have required costly social benefits and investments to be extended to Antilleans, who would become equal partners in the emergent welfare state. Formal legal integration, in other words, would both require and enable a range of socioeconomic initiatives. Not satisfied with the prospect of an empty or qualified liberty, Césaire saw departmentalization as a vehicle for integrated emancipa-tion wherein legal, political, and socioeconomic freedoms would reinforce one another.

Rather than evaluate this program for departmentalization in terms of a nation-alist logic of decolonization that presumptively reduces political emancipation to state sovereignty, we should approach it as a historically situated engagement with the refractory problem of freedom. Césaire’s support for departmentaliza-tion was a pragmatic response to a given historical conjuncture.10 He regarded total and immediate integration with France as the surest route to substantive freedom for Antillean peoples, given their poor and weak status within an impe-rial world system. If historical conditions changed or if integration failed, a new arrangement would have to be pursued. He thus imagined departmentalization

Public Culture

1 08

to be a self-surpassing project. For him, the 1946 law was a constitutional act, a founding legal initiative that derived from and would radically alter the form of the imperial nation-state by creating a citizenship that built on the imperial his-tory that had bound metropolitan and Antillean populations together within an interdependent entity.11

Departmentalization was as much a utopian as it was a pragmatic project. According to Césaire’s vision it contained an internal logic that would lead from formal legal liberty to substantive socioeconomic independence to significant social reorganization within the Antilles. The dynamic process of integrating for-mer colonies into the unitary republic would also require that the French nation-state itself be reconfigured. Césaire’s vision may be read as guided by a timely critique of current conditions. Yet it was also an untimely challenge to the Fourth Republic, which worked to maintain France as an imperial power, as well as to the dominant current of revolutionary decolonization, whose presumed telos was national independence. It was both a strategic intervention into an existing politi-cal field and a utopian anticipation of a fantasmatic postcolonial order that did not yet exist.12

The Spirit of Schoelcher

Throughout the 1940s, while he pursued departmentalization, Césaire’s politi-cal imagination was animated by the spirit of Schoelcher, the socialist legislator primarily responsible for the abolition of slavery following the 1848 Revolution in France. Césaire’s desire to engage in a dialogue with the dead seems to have been nourished during the occupation of Martinique by a Vichyist administration. Here, along with his wife, Suzanne, and their collaborator, René Ménil, Césaire edited Tropiques, the avant-garde journal that combined an interest in modernist literature, Antillean ethnology, and vitalist social thought. This legendary publi-cation became a medium through which these intellectuals frequently conjured the spirits of cultural and political predecessors whose vitality they sought to awaken in a moment of historical crisis.

11. See Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

12. Jean-Claude William explains that many on the Martinican left believed that the island would be integrating itself into a France that was about to be transformed into a socialist society (“Aimé Césaire: Les contrariétés de la conscience nationale” [“Aimé Césaire: Contrarieties of the National Conscience”], in 1946 – 1996: Cinquante ans de départementalisation outre-mer [1946 – 1996: Fifty Years of Overseas Departmentalization], ed. Fred Constant and Justin Daniel [Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997], 320).

Untimely Vision

1 09

In its final issue Césaire invokes future historians who, he predicts, will criticize contemporary French democracy for having disavowed its radical Jacobin legacy and Antillean democracy for having disavowed the radical legacy of abolitionism. As a corrective Césaire conjures the spirit of his radical predecessor: “Perhaps the Martinican people of the future will say . . . it was these men then who through force of recognition veritably rediscovered the spirit of Victor Schoelcher.”13 Looking simultaneously backward and forward, Césaire seeks not simply to remember Schoelcher but to vitalize his project — to recognize it as still present and to make it so through such recognition. This also meant rescuing Schoelcher’s radical legacy from the recuperating effects of national commemoration.

In 1948, soon after a law was passed that would transfer Schoelcher’s ashes to the Panthéon, Césaire was invited to join Léopold Sédar Senghor and Monner-ville in a centennial celebration of the abolition of slavery. But his public interven-tion at the Sorbonne disrupted this official affirmation of enlightened republican tolerance. Rather than allow Schoelcher to be subsumed within the procedural tradition of parliamentary republicanism, Césaire identified him with a discred-ited tradition of revolutionary republicanism — with popular subaltern forces, including the metropolitan proletariat and the Antillean peasantry, whose insur-rections in 1848 ensured the abolition of slavery.14

Just as the social objectives of the 1848 Revolution in France were crushed by the republican bourgeoisie, the far-reaching sociopolitical possibilities opened by slave emancipation in the Antilles were obstructed by abolition as instituted. In each of these interrelated cases, radical emancipatory projects were foreclosed by more limited forms of republican liberty. Césaire sought to awaken his contempo-raries to these forgotten legacies. He was particularly concerned with redeeming

13. Aimé Césaire, “Hommage à Victor Schoelcher” (“Homage to Victor Schoelcher”), in Tropiques, nos. 13 – 14 (1945), reprinted in Tropiques, 1941 – 1945: Collection complète (Tropiques, 1941 – 1945: Complete Collection) (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1994), 230.

14. Césaire was referring to the popular unrest that compelled administrators in Martinique to abolish slavery before the formal emancipation decree had arrived from Paris. “Discours pro-noncé par M. Aimé Césaire” (“Speech Made by Aimé Césaire”), in Gaston Monnerville, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire, Commémoration du centenaire de l’abolition de l’esclavage: Discours prononcés à la Sorbonne le 27 avril 1948 (Commemoration of the Centenary of the Aboli-tion of Slavery: Speeches Made in the Sorbonne on April 27, 1948) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), 23 – 33. For a closer reading of this intervention, see Gary Wilder, “Race, Rea-son, Impasse: Césaire, Fanon, and the Legacy of Emancipation,” Radical History Review, no. 90 (2004): 31 – 58. Césaire also develops this argument in “Hommage à Victor Schoelcher” and “Victor Schoel cher et l’abolition de l’esclavage” (“Victor Schoelcher and the Abolition of Slavery”), in Victor Schoelcher, Esclavage et colonisation (Slavery and Colonization) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), 1 – 28.

Public Culture

1 1 0

Schoelcher’s unrealized vision of comprehensive abolition. From Césaire’s postwar vantage, Schoelcher’s 1848 commitment to immediate and total emancipation — including full French citizenship, voting rights, and universal education without a paternalistic period of transition — was an untimely revolutionary act. Schoelcher made a decisive move that challenged the dominant sentiment among republi-can legislators, for whom slavery remained a normal and legitimate institution. Césaire also emphasized Schoelcher’s integrated vision of colonial emancipation: juridical liberty for freed slaves would evolve into substantive freedom through a “second emancipation” that would require and propel economic development, social restructuring, and democratic reforms.15

Pragmatically, Schoelcher was mindful that legal abolition as such was a lim-ited response to the complex problem of freedom. Strategically, he wanted to avoid another Haitian Revolution while honoring the legacy of radical republican-ism. His aim was to reorganize Antillean society and fully integrate its people into the republican nation-state. These pragmatic and strategic concerns were also elements of a utopian vision. Schoelcher’s project, as refracted through Césaire’s postwar imagination, envisioned that slave emancipation would necessitate social reorganization within Antillean territories. Closer juridico-political integration between these colonies and the metropolitan state would transform France itself in fundamental ways. Schoelcher’s constitutional measure was meant to motivate a long-term self-surpassing project for social democracy and human emancipation that anticipated a future republican order.

The historical opening provided by the 1848 Revolution made this a viable plan for comprehensive change even as the republic then created in fact foreclosed this possibility. From a strictly juridical perspective, the abolition of slavery in 1848 was an immediate and enduring success. It also secured Schoelcher’s literal membership in the Panthéon, France’s official tomb for republican luminaries. Yet abolition as actually instituted in the Antilles initiated new forms of labor ser-vitude and racial domination by what now became a paternalistic colonial state. If political power was redistributed, béké socioeconomic power was secure even

15. Césaire, “Hommage à Victor Schoelcher,” “Discours prononcé,” and “Victor Schoelcher et l’abolition.” Schoelcher’s evolving political vision may be traced through his writings in Esclavage et colonisation. For comprehensive accounts of Schoelcher’s life and political initiatives, see Nelly Schmidt, Victor Schoelcher et l’abolition de l’esclavage (Victor Schoelcher and the Abolition of Slavery) (Paris: Fayard, 1994); and Anne Girollet, Victor Schoelcher, abolitionniste et républicain: Approche juridique et politique de l’oeuvre d’un fondateur de la République (Victor Schoelcher, Abolitionist and Republican: Juridical and Political Approach of the Work of a Founder of the Republic) (Paris: Karthala, 2000).

Untimely Vision

1 1 1

if also shared with the mostly mulatto class of former gens de couleur libres. Property rights remained sacrosanct, and there was no corresponding redistribu-tion of land or wealth to former slaves. Despite suffrage, a moralized citizenship effectively helped to intensify old social stratifications, new processes of prole-tarianization, and a strict racial taxonomy. The suddenly disavowed legacy of slavery continued to weigh heavily on everyday life now organized around civic equality but suffused by fear and resentment among emancipated blacks and dis-enfranchised whites.16

Schoelcher spent the rest of his life calling on the French state to realize fully the integrated program for emancipation that he had envisioned for the Antil-les. During the Second Empire, while regressive policies were applied in these colonies, Schoelcher lived in exile in London, where he was a vocal critic of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. After returning to France, he represented Martinique under the Third Republic, first in the National Assembly and then in the Senate. Within parliament and the administration, where he served on the Commission du Travail Colonial, he struggled fruitlessly to persuade the French state that legal abolition had to be accompanied by full citizenship, socioeconomic equality, and proper integration into the republic.17

But despite this failure of abolition to truly emancipate Antilleans, Césaire declared Schoelcher a “clairvoyant” figure and “great initiator” whose “audacious act” remained immediately relevant to contemporary colonial politics.18 According to Césaire, Schoelcher anticipated the French state’s attempt in the postwar period to maintain a formal tie with colonized peoples by restructuring the imperial rela-tionship. He wrote: “To evoke Schoelcher is not to invoke an empty ghost [vain fantome]. It is to recall . . . a man whose every word remains an explosive bullet. That his project is incomplete is only too evident.”19 Césaire regularly declared

16. Myriam Cottias, “ ‘L’oubli du passé’ contre la ‘citoyenneté’: Troc et ressentiment à la Marti-nique (1848 – 1946)” (“ ‘Forgetting the Past’ for ‘Citizenship’: Barter and Resentment in Martinique [1848 – 1946]”), in Constant and Daniel, 1946 – 1996, 293 – 313; Mickaëlla Perina, Citoyenneté et sujetion aux Antilles francophones (Citizenship and Subjection in the French-Speaking Antilles) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), 16 – 28.

17. See Victor Schoelcher, Polémique coloniale (1882 – 1886) (Colonial Polemic [1882 – 1886]) (Fort-de-France: Désormeaux, 1979). On the specificity of “colonial democracy” in Martinique under the Third Republic, see Fred Constant, La retraite aux flambeaux: Société et politique en Martinique (Paris: Éditions Caribéennes, 1988), 27 – 66. Note that Schoelcher also supported Victor Hugo’s federalist vision of an “États-Unis d’Europe.”

18. Césaire, “Hommage à Victor Schoelcher,” 233 – 34.19. Césaire, “Victor Schoelcher et l’abolition,” 27. Césaire referred to Schoelcher as the figure

whom Grégoire had prophetically called forth to continue the still incomplete work of abolition

Public Culture

1 1 2

that Schoelcher’s act of emancipation was “at once immense and insufficient” — revolutionary but ever unrealized.20 He emphasized the immensity of a single act that suddenly transformed a population with the legal status of animals into humans, which allowed them to burst onto the world stage as historical actors.21 But he also cautioned that abstract formal legal liberty without economic security could not ground real freedom. According to Césaire, these newly enfranchised subjects quickly learned that “true emancipation is not that which is decreed, but that which man conquers for himself, that it is not behind them, but before them, and that it is up to them to prepare for it, in communion with the people of France, in the luminous wake of 1848.”22

Césaire here seeks not to domesticate the memory but to mobilize the legacy of 1848. His claim that abolition was limited and incomplete was not a criticism of Schoelcher but a critique of current conditions from the standpoint of his pre-decessor’s unrealized program for revolutionary social transformation and human emancipation. The 1848 abolition act, according to Césaire, “repaired the past and prepared the future.”23 For Césaire, Schoelcher remained a “present man” who possessed all of the “qualities required by the seriousness of this moment,” one in which “the colonial problem has been posed” but “remains to be resolved.”24 On the eve of decolonization, Schoelcher’s legacy was especially charged as the prospect of colonial overcoming and political emancipation by restructuring the imperial relation again presented itself. At a “moment when throughout the world the [colonial] question is no longer posed in academic terms, but with . . . machine gun fire . . . the great merit of Victor Schoelcher is . . . the present relevance [actu-alité] of Victor Schoelcher.”25 Seeking to transform Schoelcher from a national fetish into a vital force, Césaire reminded a Parisian audience gathered to cel-ebrate the hundredth anniversary of slave abolition that “it would be useless [vain] to commemorate [Schoelcher] if we had not decided to imitate his politics.”26 We

that Grégoire had initiated during the French Revolution. Aimé Césaire, “Discours d’inauguration de la place de l’abbé Grégoire, Fort-de-France, 28 décembre 1950” (“Speech at the Place de l’abbé Grégoire, Fort-de-France, December 28, 1950”), in Oeuvre historique et politique (Historical and Political Work), vol. 3 of Oeuvres complètes (Complete Works) (Fort-de-France: Desormeaux, 1976), 429.

20. Césaire, “Discours prononcé,” 415.21. Césaire, “Discours prononcé,” 413 – 15; Césaire, “Hommage à Victor Schoelcher,” 233.22. Césaire, “Discours prononcé,” 415.23. Césaire, “Discours prononcé,” 413 – 14.24. Césaire, “Hommage à Victor Schoelcher,” 235; Césaire, “Discours prononcé,” 411.25. Césaire, “Discours prononcé,” 411.26. Césaire, “Discours prononcé,” 411.

Untimely Vision

1 1 3

can see here how, for Césaire, a certain practice of radical remembrance could challenge the reifying and depoliticizing operations of official commemoration.

By calling on the spirit and legacy of Schoelcher, Césaire implicitly con-structed what Walter Benjamin would have referred to as a historical constellation that linked abolition in 1848 to departmentalization in 1946.27 Both projects were envisioned as self-surpassing. Each anticipated that legal emancipation would propel socioeconomic reorganization in the Antilles and transcend the existing imperial order immanently through integration rather than separation. And their respective advocates were prepared to recalibrate their strategies if these consti-tutional initiatives proved unable to address the problem of freedom adequately or if they were superseded by evolving historical conditions. Césaire wrote that Schoelcher had “a very lucid view of the conditions of true liberty” and that “his grandeur is precisely in the fact that he knew not to be a prisoner of his own work, that he knew how to surpass [dépasser] it.”28 He outlined how the focus of Schoe-lcher’s political vision evolved over time, from the formal abolition of slavery to the fundamental transformation of Antillean colonies into peasant democra-cies that would be integrated into the French nation as official departments with proper parliamentary representation. Recognizing that Schoelcher was a longtime advocate of political assimilation for the Antillean colonies, Césaire insisted that the great abolitionist was the true progenitor of the March 1946 departmentaliza-tion law.29 And when, one hundred years after abolition, departmentalization also proved unable to ensure substantive freedom for Antilleans, Césaire similarly refused to be a prisoner of his own previous work. When, as after 1848, the radi-cal possibilities for social equality that were opened by departmentalization were obstructed by the restricted civic equality that it actually established, Césaire revised his political project without abandoning his underlying vision.

27. On “constellations,” see Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2003), 27 – 56; Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 462 – 63; Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, 261, 262, 264; Theodor Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (London: Blackwell, 2000), 23 – 39; Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics (New York: Free Press, 1977); and Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berke-ley: University of California Press, 1994), 90 – 106.

28. Césaire, “Victor Schoelcher et l’abolition,” 26 – 27.29. Césaire, “Victor Schoelcher et l’abolition,” 27. But when Césaire later became an advocate

of autonomy for Martinique, he criticized how the Right retrospectively recuperated Schoelcher as a departmentalist (JORF, Assemblée nationale, 2e séance, December 17, 1982, 8489 – 90).

Public Culture

1 1 4

Overcoming Departmentalization

Between 1946 and 1956 Césaire evolved from passionately advocating for depart-mentalization to calling for its “negation.”30 In a series of parliamentary interven-tions while occupying Schoelcher’s own former seat as deputy from Martinique, he criticized the French state for failing to apply immediately all metropolitan laws, especially employment and social security provisions, to the new Antillean departments. He repeatedly reminded the National Assembly that the spirit of the 1946 law also required economic investments, new social policies, and demo-cratic reforms. His goal remained consistent: to “abolish [colonial status] through integration” by transforming the formal liberty accorded by departmentalization into full citizenship, social equality, and economic development.31

At first Césaire attacked the unreconstructed colonial attitude toward the Antilles demonstrated by metropolitan policy makers and overseas administra-tors, whom he denounced as duplicitous, corrupt, and incompetent. He warned fellow legislators that shortsighted policies, which had created a “parody of assimilation” and “caricatures of departments,” would inevitably nourish revo-lutionary nationalist sentiments among a heretofore loyal Antillean population.32 Definitive separation from France in the future, he argued, would be more cata-strophic for French national interests than would proper integration in the present. Tacking skillfully between practical and apocalyptic registers, Césaire’s interven-tions identified the grand ethicopolitical principles at stake in seemingly mundane policies as well as the momentous historical consequences that would follow the state’s refusal to accede to legitimate demands for modest social and democratic reforms by relatively powerless but loyal citizens.

But by the mid-1950s Césaire had shifted from challenging the French state to implement departmentalization fully to formulating an account of why it could

30. Aimé Césaire, “Pour la transformation de la Martinique en region dans le cadre d’une union française federée” (“For the Transformation of Martinique into the Framework of a French Union Federation”), in Oeuvres complètes, 3:478.

31. Quoted in Ernest Moutoussamy, Aimé Césaire: Député à l’Assemblée nationale, 1945 – 1993 (Aimé Césaire: Deputy to the National Assembly, 1945 – 1993) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993), 54. This volume republishes extensive portions of Césaire’s postwar parliamentary and political discourses. In parliamentary debates Césaire forcefully challenged the delay between political and social assim-ilation. See his interventions in JORF, Assemblée nationale, 1e séance, July 10, 1947, 2895; JORF, Assemblée nationale, 2e séance, December 29, 1947, 6445; and JORF, Assemblée nationale, 2e séance, July 16, 1948. On the French state’s reluctance to implement social legislation in the overseas departments, see Bertrand François-Lubin, “Les méandres de la politique sociale outre-mer” (“The Meanders of Overseas Social Policy”), in Constant and Daniel, 1946 – 1996, 73 – 83.

32. Quoted in Moutoussamy, Aimé Césaire, 40, 54.

Untimely Vision

1 1 5

33. Césaire, “Pour la transformation,” 482.34. Quoted in Moutoussamy, Aimé Césaire, 54.35. His shift was also informed by the worsening war in Algeria, which he challenged in the

assembly.36. Césaire, “Pour la transformation,” 478.37. Césaire, “Pour la transformation,” 478. He also develops a related but different account of

the dialectical overcoming of departmentalization in his introduction to Daniel Guérin, Les Antilles décolonisées (The Decolonized Antilles) (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956), 7 – 15.

38. Césaire, “Pour la transformation,” 478.

never elevate Antilleans into full French citizens. Genuine equality for Martin-ique, according to Césaire, would have required that all labor and social welfare protections be immediately extended to its people whose standard of living would have to be raised to a metropolitan level. And genuine socioeconomic indepen-dence would have required a commitment to industrialization, free participation in the global market, and permission to erect customs protections.33 Such measures, however, were unacceptable to the metropolitan government: the first set would have cost too much, while the second would have undermined Martinique’s status as a neocolonial territory. For years Césaire had argued that departmentalization had to be implemented to alleviate persistent poverty and social misery in Mar-tinique. By this time, however, he suggested that departmentalization itself was the source of Martinique’s stagnation and unemployment. Rather than criticize the state for failing to implement the 1946 law, his critique identified how the law, by creating “départements d’exception,” authorized an institutional framework directly responsible for enduring inequality, exploitation, and dependence.34

Césaire recognized that France would not allow Antillean colonialism to be overcome through integration.35 Departmentalization, which had begun as a his-toric opening for substantive emancipation, had become an obstacle to it. In a dialectical account of this process, Césaire argued that until 1945 economic and social isolation had provided Martinique with a large measure of autonomy. But “this status became a fetter on the development of Martinique and an obstacle to our progress. Thus was born the idea of departmentalization.”36 He explained, “If one day the regime created by departmentalization, thanks to the very progress due to departmentalization, in turn appears as an obstacle, nothing, that is to say, no fetishism, will prevent it from being called into question [remis en cause] to make room for a regime that will be not only the negation of the two previ-ous regimes but their transcended and enriched form.”37 Clearly, ten years after the 1946 law, departmentalization had indeed become an obstacle to progress. Césaire challenged it directly as an overly centralized and undemocratic system directed by outsiders that perpetuated structural inequality for Antilleans.38

Public Culture

1 1 6

Departmentalization as instituted had obstructed Césaire’s 1946 emancipa-tory vision at the very moment that decolonization across the imperial periphery was gathering momentum. In 1956 he denounced France’s untimely attempt “to decolonize Africa and recolonize the Antilles” through departmentalization and questioned Martinique’s dubious legal status.39 During his reelection campaign Césaire distributed a public statement that declared that relief from the territory’s desperate economic situation would not come from continental France. It called on the people of Martinique to “assume a greater role in the management of their own affairs. . . . What we propose is a policy democratic in its inspiration, social in its goals, and Martinican in its means.”40 Soon thereafter Césaire left the French Communist Party. In his legendary letter of resignation to Maurice Thorez, he called for a “Copernican Revolution” whereby Martinicans would take greater responsibility for an anticolonial struggle that would henceforth be self-directed and grounded in black peoples’ specific conditions, problems, and cultures.41 He concluded by linking this call for political autonomy in the Antilles to one for greater solidarity with a wider range of international Pan-African struggles.

In 1958 Césaire cofounded the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais (PPM) to serve as the institutional vehicle for “cooperative federalism,” the autonomous political project that he hoped would transcend departmentalization. Through the PPM Césaire aligned himself with a movement led by African colonial legislators to recon-stitute the French nation-state as a federal republic. He maintained that “the federal idea” could “dialectically overcome” the “antinomy” of assimilation (by which he meant departmentalization) and autonomy (by which he meant full independence). Césaire argued that by forcing the impoverished territory to be financially self- sufficient, total autonomy would “provoke the dismantling of our social laws and . . . [an] attack on our workers’ standard of living,” creating only an “autonomy of wretchedness [autonomie de la misère].” But the alternative to this “separatism that would kill us” was total assimilation, which he now regarded as cultural suicide. Invoking Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s utopian socialist conception of federation as well as Italy’s federal constitution, Césaire proposed ongoing affiliation with France within a postcolonial federalist framework as the best way to ensure economic via-bility, cultural autonomy, and political self-management for Martinique.42

39. Quoted in Moutoussamy, Aimé Césaire, 74.40. Quoted in Moutoussamy, Aimé Césaire, 62.41. Césaire, Lettre à Maurice Thorez (Letter to Maurice Thorez) (Paris: Présence Africaine,

1956), 13.42. Césaire, “Pour la transformation,” 479 – 92. For the federalist program advocated by African

colonial legislators, see Senghor’s parliamentary interventions collected in Léopold Sédar Senghor,

Untimely Vision

1 1 7

Cooperative federalism would overcome colonialism and transcend the false choice between departmentalization and independence by sublating the cen-tralized nation-state, or what Senghor called the unitary republic. Once again Césaire pursued the promise of decolonization without national independence. Just as departmentalization was meant to reawaken the future past of Schoelcher’s utopian vision of abolition, Césaire now sought, through federalism, to extend the not yet realized promises for social equality and political emancipation that were condensed in his original program for departmentalization. And like its prede-cessors, this new arrangement was meant to be provisional and self-surpassing. Césaire emphasized that his current support for federalism depended on the situ-ation that existed “in the present moment” and that he could not “prejudge future evolution.”43 If conditions changed, cooperative federalism might have to be negated and transcended as well.

The Legacy of Louverture

Just as Césaire’s earlier vision of departmentalization was mediated by the spirit of Schoelcher and the legacy of abolition in 1848, his program for federal auton-omy was mediated by the spirit of Louverture and the legacy of the 1790s revo-lution in Saint-Domingue. Césaire first visited Haiti for a seven-month stay at the invitation of the French surrealist writer Pierre Mabille, then conseiller cul-turel with the French embassy there. While in Haiti he delivered his important philosophico-poetic treatise, “Poésie et connaissance,” in September 1944 at the Congrès International de Philosophie in Port-au-Prince.44 Reflecting on this visit sixty years later, Césaire recalled feeling overwhelmed by the cautionary example of “this terribly complex society. . . . Most of all in Haiti I saw what should not be done! A country that had conquered its liberty, that had conquered its indepen-dence, and which I saw was more miserable than Martinique, a French colony! . . . It was tragic, and that could very well happen to us Martinicans as well.”45

Liberté 2: Nation et voie africaine du socialisme (Liberty 2: Nation and the African Way of Social-ism) (Paris: Seuil, 1971).

43. Césaire, “Pour la transformation,” 488.44. Roger Toumson and Simonne Henry-Valmore, Aimé Césaire: Le nègre inconsolé (Aimé

Césaire: The Unconsoled Negro) (La Roque d’Anthéron: Vents d’Ailleurs, 2002), 95 – 97. Césaire’s “Poésie et connaissance” (“Poetry and Knowledge”) was then published in Tropiques, no. 12 (1945), and reprinted in Tropiques, 1941 – 1945, 157 – 70.

45. Aimé Césaire, Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai: Entretiens avec Françoise Vergès (Negro I Am, Negro I Will Remain: Discussions with Françoise Vergès) (Paris: Michel, 2005), 56.

Public Culture

1 1 8

Césaire’s confrontation with the “colonial problem” as revealed through and in Haiti thus began in the 1940s. But he did not begin writing directly about these events until the late 1950s, precisely when he reoriented his own political project away from assimilation and toward federal autonomy. This work, including an extended historical essay on Louverture and a play about the tragic reign of King Christophe, linked reflections on revolutionary politics, postcolonial liberation, and historical temporality.46

It is important to note that at the end of his life, when the actual abolition of slavery had foreclosed the emancipatory possibilities of his 1848 program for abolition, Schoelcher had also turned to the legacy of Louverture. The specter of the revolution in Saint-Domingue had figured prominently in Schoelcher’s politi-cal imagination, especially after his visit to independent Haiti in 1841.47 Fear of another catastrophic eruption in the Antilles informed his interest in establishing an enduring association between France and its population of former slaves. This pragmatic concern was paired with a principled commitment to radical republi-can ideals, which he saw embodied in Louverture’s freedom struggle. On July 27, 1879, Schoelcher was invited to give a talk in Paris on Louverture as part of an effort by Thomas-Prosper Gragnon-Lacoste to raise funds to construct a memo-rial tomb for Louverture in Bordeaux, where his ashes remained.48 This talk laid the foundation for the carefully documented historical monograph on Louverture that Schoelcher then published in 1889.49

46. Aimé Césaire, Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial (Tous-saint Louverture: The French Revolution and the Colonial Problem) (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1962); Césaire, La tragédie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe) (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1970). The latter may be read as a parable of decolonization that, like Césaire’s 1966 play about Patrice Lumumba, Une saison au Congo (A Season in Congo) (Paris: Seuil, 2001), enacts and meditates on the very interpenetration of historical epochs that I explore. These plays illuminate the underlying continuities among Césaire’s politics, criticism, and aesthetics. They also resonate with Edouard Glissant’s later call for a “prophetic vision of the past” in his 1961 play organized around “the simultaneity of the two time frames in which Toussaint lives” and marked by “the equivalence of past and present” (preface to the 1st ed. of Monsieur Toussaint: A Play, trans. J. Michael Dash and Edouard Glissant [Boulder, Colo.: Reinner, 2005], 15, 16).

47. See Victor Schoelcher, Colonies étrangères et Haiti (Foreign Colonies and Haiti) (Pointe-à-Pitre: Désormeaux, 1973), vol. 2.

48. Victor Schoelcher, Conférence sur Toussaint Louverture, général en chef de l’armée de Saint-Domingue (Conference on Toussaint Louverture, General in Chief of the Army of Saint-Domingue) (Port-au-Prince: Panorama, 1966). Following the talk, Ernest Legouvé, one of the organizers, pre-sented a celebratory summary of Schoelcher’s role in the 1848 abolition of slavery, concluding with the proposal that he now be called “Schoelcher Louverture” (51).

49. Victor Schoelcher, Vie de Toussaint Louverture (Life of Toussaint Louverture) (Paris: Karthala, 1982).

Untimely Vision

1 1 9

For Schoelcher, the revolution in Saint-Domingue had demonstrated that the course of history could be redirected and a new society created when a population of enslaved blacks transformed themselves into a self-determining political force. Schoelcher also mourned Louverture’s descent into despotism as a tragic betrayal of republican principles. In contrast, Césaire understood this dictatorship circum-stantially, as compelled by a revolutionary crisis, and argued that Louverture had chosen to sacrifice himself as a political act addressed to a future generation. Each writer treated Louverture critically and empathetically, identified with him in complex ways, and sought to work out his own emancipatory project by work-ing through Louverture’s confrontation with the problem of freedom. In different ways, Schoelcher and Césaire attended equally to the immensity of Louverture’s achievements, the impossibility of his enterprise, his manifold failures, and the ever-unrealized possibilities for black liberty and human emancipation that his interventions opened. Additionally, Schoelcher and Césaire both turned to Lou-verture precisely when the radical possibilities of their own utopian visions had been foreclosed and their strategies needed to be revised.

In his 1962 study Césaire refers to Louverture as “the Precursor.”50 In doing so, I would suggest, he is not only identifying his predecessor as the avatar of modern anticolonial revolution. Césaire’s Louverture is also, and perhaps most importantly, a patient and visionary political strategist, a skilled reader of historical conditions who grasped the importance of negotiation, compromise, and timing. Ever mind-ful of long-term strategy, he repeatedly made sacrifices in the present, includ-ing that of his own life, to ensure the future freedom of his people. For Césaire, Louverture demonstrated a self-reflexive and self-surpassing ability to “reconvert his politics” by abandoning previous positions for new ones that corresponded more adequately to rapidly changing historical conditions.51 Throughout the long revolutionary struggle Louverture remained concerned with identifying the set of arrangements that would ensure the greatest liberty for his people given the existing order. Such concerns led him successively to fight against French revo-lutionaries, to fight alongside them against enemies of republicanism, to propose a novel form of colonial autonomy within an imperial federation, and finally to confront France directly in an epic revolutionary battle with Napoléon.52

50. Césaire, Toussaint Louverture, 345.51. Césaire, Toussaint Louverture, 250.52. This reading of Louverture’s politics is based in part on his own writings, which are gener-

ously excerpted in Schoelcher, Vie de Toussaint Louverture; Césaire, Toussaint Louverture; and Toussaint L’Ouverture, ed. George F. Tyson Jr. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1973). It is also indebted to the important and insightful accounts provided in C. L. R. James, The Black

Public Culture

1 20

Beneath these apparent reversals, Louverture’s goals remained consistent: gen-eral liberty for emancipated slaves, economic independence for the territory, and political autonomy over local affairs. Given the imperial order that postemanci-pation Saint-Domingue would have to confront, he believed that these objectives could best be ensured through a formal partnership with imperial France. He sought to institutionalize all of these precepts in the scandalous July 1801 consti-tution, whose drafting he commissioned and which he sent directly to metropoli-tan France to be publicized and approved.53

Louverture recognized that historical developments had made it possible for Saint-Domingue to be a self-governing and economically independent partner of France. Among them were the transnational interdependence that characterized the French imperial economy, the republican sensibility that circulated through-out the Atlantic as the French Revolution unfolded, and the de facto sovereignty that the slave rebellion had given him the opportunity to seize. Louverture seemed to believe that emancipation could be institutionalized and existing colonialism could be transcended only through a formal affiliation with imperial France. In other words, self-determination for Saint-Domingue would be possible without state sovereignty. His constitution may therefore be read as a modest proposal to formalize an already existing state of affairs that would also have revolu-tionary implications. The political arrangement that Louverture envisioned and enacted would have fundamentally reconfigured the colonial character of Saint-Domingue (by ending French sovereignty over local affairs), the imperial relation between France and the colony (by redefining it as a partnership), the republican

Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1963); Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776 – 1848 (London: Verso, 1989); Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991); David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); and Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).

53. Scholars have generally been more concerned with explaining Louverture’s descent into des-potism than with examining the particular political vision expressed in his constitutional act. The latter is usually understood as a de facto declaration of independence, an attempt to buy time until such a declaration could be made, or a missed opportunity to do so properly. For a notable exception, see Claude Moïse, Le projet national de Toussaint Louverture (The National Project of Toussaint Louverture) (Port-au-Prince: Mémoire, 2001). Dubois, Avengers of the New World, also takes seri-ously Louverture’s commitment to renegotiate the colony’s relationship to France. In “Louverture, Dessalines, and the Quest for Sovereignty” (unpublished paper), Dubois argues persuasively that Louverture chose not to declare independence. On Toussaint’s insistence that the people of Saint-Domingue retain French nationality, see Julia Gaffield, “Complexities of Imagining Haiti: A Study of National Constitutions, 1801 – 1807,” Journal of Social History 41 (2007): 81 – 103.

Untimely Vision

1 2 1

character of the French nation-state (by sanctioning decentralized legal plural-ism), and the national character of the republic (by constituting the republic as a multinational federation). Such a partnership would have also undermined the racist norms governing the existing capitalist, imperial, and interstate systems. These factors led Napoléon to prefer to destroy the colony absolutely than to sanction the autonomy of a society of freed slaves led by a black general.54

This historically possible system of shared sovereignty — colonial emancipa-tion without national independence — thus proved politically impossible. Lou-verture’s untimely intervention was out of sync on the one hand with French national and imperial norms and on the other with the separatist wishes of his own militant soldiers and slave rebels, who distrusted his willingness to collabo-rate with white planters and officials. Perhaps knowingly, Louverture’s audacious constitution provoked the epic military confrontation with Napoléon that led to Louverture’s untimely death, to the demise of his political experiment, and to an independent Haiti. When all signs indicated that his dream of a federal partner-ship would not be realized and that Napoléon would try to reinstitute slavery in Saint-Domingue, Louverture was willing to confront France in brutal war to defend general liberty in and local autonomy for Saint-Domingue. Yet until the end, when he was arrested, deported, and imprisoned, he insisted that he was a servant of the French Republic, that Saint-Domingue remained a French colony, and that political autonomy for Saint-Domingue within an imperial framework would best serve both parties.

Césaire contends that insofar as it anticipated contemporary forms of dominion and commonwealth, Louverture’s constitution was 150 years ahead of its time.55 This political act exemplified the antinomic circle characteristic of strategic uto-pian projects. It would have helped create an alternative set of arrangements that could be instituted only in a world that had already been transformed in precisely these ways. But we must also remember that Louverture elaborated a fantastic plan for an autonomous Caribbean republic that already actually existed. By 1801 he had in fact fashioned a functioning society in Saint-Domingue composed of formally free people whom he governed (albeit as a revolutionary dictator) with-out the intercession of French officials. This free black state was economically self-sufficient. Its plantation exports allowed it to maintain an interdependent rela-tionship with imperial France even as it concluded independent commercial and diplomatic treaties with neighboring colonies and states.56 Louverture’s regime

54. See Dubois, Avengers of the New World.55. Césaire, Toussaint Louverture, 279, 283.56. Schoelcher, Vie de Toussaint Louverture; Dubois, Avengers of the New World.

Public Culture

1 2 2

then was an actually existing impossibility. His constitution may be regarded as a concrete or enacted utopia. By acting as if the impossible were possible, and as if the not yet present future had already arrived, his initiative hastened its arrival. It performed the impossible both to reshape the present and to address itself to a future that it anticipated in the quadruple sense of preceding, foreseeing, enacting, and calling forth.

It is in this sense that Louverture may indeed be regarded as a precursor whose precedent and spirit remained present to future figures such as Schoelcher and Césaire. But just as Schoelcher’s legacy had to be liberated from the official republican commemoration of abolition, Louverture’s legacy had to be disentan-gled from mythic narratives that fixed him as the father of Haitian independence. Memories of Louverture, of course, never disappeared. His legendary stature only grew during the nineteenth century as the specter of the Haitian Revolution haunted French policy makers and inspired peoples of African descent.57 But the revolutionary and utopian specificity of Louverture’s constitutional initiative to create a postcolonial partnership has often been obscured.

The momentous event of Haitian independence helped create the appearance of a necessary association among anticolonialism, political emancipation, and national independence. There had been a historic opportunity to create a novel political framework through which substantive freedom could be pursued by colonized peoples. But as with abolition in 1848, this emancipatory opening was foreclosed by a more limited, nationalist form of political liberty that was actu-ally instituted in Haiti. This political equation between colonial emancipation and national liberation was later reinforced by activists and scholars who regarded the Haitian Revolution through the optic of twentieth-century anticolonialism. Commentators thus continue to interpret Louverture’s refusal to declare national independence as a failure to do so. And his commitment to affiliate with France has often been criticized as poor judgment, false consciousness, or instrumental duplicity. Césaire’s postwar projects for decolonization without national indepen-dence, which were subject to these same accusations, may be fruitfully situated within Louverture’s lineage.

But to claim that Césaire’s turn to federation was mediated by the legacy of Louverture is not to suggest that he simply imitated the Precursor directly. Rather,

57. This proliferation of discourse must be recalled as a counterpoint to Michel Rolph Trouillot’s influential argument about the later silence and unthinkability of the Haitian Revolution in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1997). See also Charles Forsdick, “Situating Haiti: On Some Early Nineteenth-Century Representations of Toussaint Louverture,” International Journal of Francophone Studies 10 (2007): 17 – 34.

Untimely Vision

1 2 3

Césaire’s writing enacts a range of sometimes ambivalent identifications. His engagement with Haitian history clearly informed his programmatic writings and political interventions about “true” decolonization as a revolutionary overcoming of colonialism that included indispensable political, socioeconomic, cultural, and psychic dimensions.58 The legacy of the revolution in Saint-Domingue — violent, popular, and separatist — also informed Césaire’s strategic politics. He conjured it as a portentous precedent for the Antillean revolution that, he warned the National Assembly, would surely come if France continued to treat the new departments as colonial possessions. An equivalent revolutionary catastrophe was thus figured as both imminent and avoidable.59 Yet the Haitian Revolution, as mythic rupture, also functioned for Césaire as a projective object through which he acted out a frustrated desire for the anticolonial revolution that might never come in postwar Martinique, despite the devolution of departmentalization into neocolonialism.

Césaire was more resolute about embracing Louverture’s legacy as a clairvoy-ant political strategist who confronted the problem of freedom in counterintui-tive and often unpopular ways. Césaire’s project also required patience, negotia-tion, and self-sacrifice.60 As they had for the Precursor, historical transformations compelled Césaire at crucial junctures to rethink his strategy, abandon earlier positions, and formulate new programs of action. Both figures dissociated self- determination from national independence and envisioned political autonomy within a postcolonial federation that would sublate the existing nation-state. Each recognized that imperialism itself had created the conditions for overcoming colonial subjection through federalism. Each proposed seemingly modest adjust-ments to existing arrangements that could in turn transcend them even as such revolutionary changes would largely affirm an already emergent set of relations.

58. See Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism) (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2000); Césaire, “Culture et colonisation” (“Culture and Colonisation”), Présence afri-caine, nos. 8 – 10 (1956): 190 – 205; Césaire, introduction to Guérin, Les Antilles décolonisées; Césaire, “L’homme de culture et ses responsabilités” (“The Man of Culture and His Responsibilities”), Présence africaine, nos. 24 – 25 (1959): 116 – 22; and Césaire, “Crise dans les départements d’outre-mer ou crise de la départementalisation?” (“Crisis in the Overseas Departments or a Departmentalization Crisis?”), Présence africaine, no. 36 (1961): 109 – 11.

59. Dubois’s work demonstrates that such anxious and prophetic warnings of Antillean revolu-tions that would come unless slavery were abolished extend back to prerevolutionary Saint-Domingue in the writings of Louis Sebastien Mercier and the abbé Raynal. See Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 57 – 59. Césaire was also evoking a tradition of successive uprisings, unrest, and strikes in Martinique extending from the 1820s to the 1960s.

60. Césaire made similar points about the long-term commitments, lifelong struggles, and repeated setbacks of Grégoire and Schoelcher (Césaire, “Discours d’inauguration de la place de l’abbé Grégoire”; JORF, December 17, 1982).

Public Culture

1 2 4

Emancipation and the (Nationalist) Logic of Decolonization

After World War II a new global context and institutional framework, including the one created by the Fourth Republic under the name of the French Union for frankly imperial aims, again made postcolonial federation a real historical pos-sibility. Yet in an era of Gaullist nationalism and revolutionary anticolonialism, a project that proposed transcending the republican nation-state from within and abolishing colonialism without declaring national independence also appeared implausibly anachronistic. Such a program could be realized only in a world order that was already postimperial, postnational, and postracial. But by acting as if such a future was within reach and might arrive at any moment, Césaire’s federal-ism may also be understood as an enacted and concrete utopia. By pursuing an impossible vision systematically, he revealed what might actually be possible in the present. And by seizing the present possible, he glimpsed what appeared to be an impossible future. Césaire wagered on an elevated French republic through an untimely intervention that looked simultaneously backward, to emancipate futures past, and forward, to anticipate futures to come. Here was a dialectic of the possible and the impossible as well as the timely and the untimely wherein each disclosed, inhered within, and helped realize the other.

In short, Césaire elaborated a cosmopolitan vision that called for and called forth a political form that did not yet exist. My argument, in other words, should not be read as a revisionist claim that the French Union was anything other than a form of imperial rule or that the overseas departments would fare better by remaining French colonies. My point is that Césaire was not simply demanding that overseas peoples be fully integrated into the existing republic. He was pro-posing a type of integration that would transform the republic definitively. France itself would be reconstituted as a postcolonial and social democratic federation whose multinational and multicultural character would be politically formalized. Legal pluralism, disaggregated sovereignty, and territorial disjuncture would be institutionalized. The presumptive unity of culture, nationality, and citizenship would be ruptured. Césaire identified in France’s national history revolutionary traditions of populism, socialism, and self-management that could be linked to the legacies and prophecies of Schoelcher and Louverture. The project was not sim-ply to apply an existing republicanism to new groups of peoples but to transform republicanism, in relation to emergent historical conditions, so that its underlying potentiality for human emancipation might be more fully realized. Césaire hoped thereby to fashion an elevated postnational republic that would necessarily trans-

Untimely Vision

1 2 5

61. Here we should recall Adorno’s insight about Franz Kafka’s “literalness” through which he “explodes [an object] by taking it more exactly at its word than it does itself.” Theodor Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 151.

62. In addition to Marx’s suggestion that cooperative labor, large-scale industrial production, and joint stock companies already signaled an incipient if still alienated form of socialism, we might recall Benjamin’s claim, borrowed from Gershom Scholem, that for Jews, in the post-Messianic “world to come . . . everything will be the same as here — only a little bit different.” Walter Benjamin, “In the Sun,” in Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 2:664; and The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, ed. Gershom Scholem (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 123n. Similarly, Adorno suggests that only a “hair’s breadth” separates knowledge conditioned by the world as it actually exists from knowledge of the world as it would appear from the standpoint of redemption. Theodor Adorno, Minima Mora-lia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 2005), 247.

63. For defenses of state sovereignty as necessary for Third World social democracy, see Samir Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World (London: Zed, 1990); and Pheng Cheah, Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).

value the very idea of France.61 Said differently, Césaire identified imperialism as federation in alienated form; he recognized prospectively that the possibility of a postcolonial federation was already immanent to the existing empire.62

I have suggested that in 1848 and in 1801 emancipatory possibilities were foreclosed by actual forms of political liberty that were instituted. Likewise, the visionary potential contained in Césaire’s initiatives for departmentalization and federalism were obstructed not only by a recalcitrant French state but by the doxa of decolonization itself that restricted emancipation to state sovereignty. This political presumption, shared by colonial powers as well as many colonized peo-ples, was subsequently reinforced by activism, criticism, and scholarship that dis-credited the prospect of decolonization without national independence. I am not claiming that national states are inherently oppressive, or that federalism is inher-ently progressive, or that decolonization should never entail state sovereignty.63 My aim is merely to challenge the tendency to treat projects for nonnational colo-nial emancipation as inherently reactionary.

Regardless of their real limitations, we need to analyze Césaire’s postwar ini-tiatives not in terms of an independence supposed to be inevitable but in terms of a fragile freedom whose institutional form could not be presumed in advance. His interventions help us recognize the contingent rather than necessary relation-ship among emancipation, independence, sovereignty, self-determination, and autonomy. His initiatives were situated attempts to create the conditions and to

Public Culture

1 26

invent a form in which the greatest degree of substantive freedom for Antilleans could be secured in relation to the existing and emergent orders, even as they also anticipated a seemingly impossible future to come. Yet critics often find it dif-ficult to recognize that Césaire’s untimely commitment to future affiliation with a transformed France was not simply a political failure or a compromise but a principled position animated by a radical political strategy that placed present and future, existent and imagined, into a dynamic relationship.64

The evidence suggests that Césaire’s postwar interventions flowed from a prag-matic insight that territorial sovereignty would not be the most effective way for small countries with limited resources to secure substantive liberty in the emer-gent Cold War order. He recognized that threats from global capitalism, American hegemony, and a new European Union (EU) would be at least as great as those that he expected from ongoing affiliation with imperial France. And he foresaw that decolonization would be a process of rending whereby overseas French nation-als would be stripped of a range of hard-won political rights and social entitle-ments.65 Also animating his project was a principled belief that a federal republic might be the most progressive framework through which to pursue postcolonial democracy and development. Equally present was a utopian hope that such con-stitutional initiatives might help to radically transform sociopolitical relations on national, imperial, and international scales. We may thus identify in Césaire’s postwar political commitments and strategies an internal connection among the pragmatic, the ethical, and the utopian in which each modality inhered within and nourished the others. Césaire’s utopianism was sustained by an underlying relationship among immanent critique, concrete acts, and political imagination. He pursued apparently impossible objectives in a practical and systematic fashion. His pragmatic interventions were animated by critical foresight and revolutionary anticipation, yet with full knowledge that such historically possible projects might be politically impossible. At the same time, he pursued radical transformations based on conditions and institutions that actually existed.

64. For empathetic and insightful interpretations of Césaire’s postwar projects that resonate with my own, see Michel Giraud, “De la négritude à la créolité: Une évolution paradoxale à l’ère départ-mentale” (“From Negritude to Creoleness: A Paradoxical Evolution during the Departmentalization Period”), in Constant and Daniel, 1946 – 1996, 373 – 401; William, “Aimé Césaire”; and Nick Nes-bitt, “Departmentalization and the Logic of Decolonization,” L’esprit créateur 47 (2007): 32 – 43.

65. Cf. Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Todd Shepard, The Inven-tion of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni-versity Press, 2006).

Untimely Vision

1 2 7

From the perspective of Césaire’s strategic utopianism, we can appreci-ate that “untimeliness” may have intentionally informed, rather than tragically undermined, his political strategy. He engaged history not to mourn lost pasts romantically but to awaken proleptic possibilities. The futurity of his projects for nonnational emancipation, addressed to a world to come, was inseparable from their historicity, from the long-term lineage that linked Louverture’s constitu-tion, Schoelcher’s abolitionism, Césaire’s departmentalization, and Senghor’s fed-eralism. The complex political temporalities of Césaire’s postwar interventions alert us to the fact that the period 1945 – 62 cannot simply contain the history of decolonization. I am not only observing that there were important precedents for decolonization. I am suggesting, in a deeper sense, that these earlier figures and eras persisted as vitally present elements of postwar politics, not simply as memo-ries but as living spirits, durable legacies, and effective forces, at least for the historical actors involved. Accordingly, historiography must grapple with the very real way in which the 1790s and 1840s constituted immediate historical contexts for the 1940s and 1950s.66

To study Césaire’s untimely political interventions in this way helps us approach the postwar period not in terms of the frozen Cold War order that came to be but as a world-historical opening in which a variety of nonnational political arrange-ments and experiments were imagined and enacted before being foreclosed. It also allows us to recognize how the not yet realized emancipatory possibilities contained in Césaire’s strategic utopian responses to the refractory problem of freedom remain available to us as vital legacies today. Given Césaire’s recent death, the question of his often-discredited political legacy has also become sud-denly timely.

Postcolonial Martinique

With Charles de Gaulle’s election as president in 1958, following the civil crisis attending the escalating Algerian war, the principles of unitary republicanism were reaffirmed. Hopes for a real postcolonial federation, beyond the nominal Com-munauté Française, quickly faded. Under the Fifth Republic, economic decline, neocolonial exploitation, social dependence, and cultural alienation — which also corresponded to a surge of labor migration to the metropole — fueled political

66. Colonial histories that implicitly construct constellations between distinct epochs and address processes of temporal refraction include Césaire’s and Glissant’s works on Toussaint (cited above); James, Black Jacobins; as well as Scott, Conscripts of Modernity; and Richard Price, The Convict and the Colonel: A Story of Colonialism and Resistance in the Caribbean (Boston: Beacon, 1998).

Public Culture

1 2 8

67. William F. S. Miles, Elections and Ethnicity in French Martinique: A Paradox in Paradise (New York: Praeger, 1986), 141 – 58; Constant, La retraite aux flambeaux, 67 – 86; Richard D. E. Burton, “The French West Indies à l’heure de l’Europe: An Overview,” in French and West Indian: Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana Today, ed. Richard D. E. Burton and Fred Reno (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 1 – 19; José Nosel, “Appréciation de l’impact économique de la départmentalisation à la Martinique” (“Evaluation of the Economic Impact of Departmentalization in Martinique”), in Constant and Daniel, 1946 – 1996, 25 – 71; François-Lubin, “Les méandres de la politique sociale outre-mer”; Nicolas, Histoire de la Martinique, 243 – 86; Alain Anselin, L’émigration antillais en France: La troisième île (Antillean Emigration to France: The Third Island) (Paris: Karthala, 1990); Fred Constant, “La politique migratoire: Essai d’un évalua-tion” (“Migratory Policy: A Tentative Evaluation”), in Constant and Daniel, 1946 – 1996, 97 – 132; David Beriss, Black Skin, French Voices: Caribbean Ethnicity and Activism in Urban France (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2004), 1 – 21, 61 – 72; Madeleine Dobie, “Invisible Exodus: The Cultural Effacement of Antillean Migration,” Diaspora 13 (2004): 149 – 83.

68. At the 1971 “Convention pour l’Autonomie des Quatres DOM” at Morne Rouge, representa-tives from across the anticolonialist Left in all four departments denounced departmentalization and declared their support for self-determination through a new autonomy status. Nicolas, Histoire de la Martinique, 294 – 95.

69. On the independence movement and parties, see Miles, Elections and Ethnicity, 45 – 55, 207 – 16; Richard D. E. Burton, “The Idea of Difference in Contemporary French West Indian Thought: Négritude, Antillanité, Créolité,” in Burton and Reno, French and West Indian, 150 – 52; and Burton, “French West Indies,” 16 – 18. Alfred Marie-Jeanne of the Mouvement Indépendan-tiste Martiniquais Party was elected deputy to the National Assembly in 1997 and president of the Conseil Régionale in 1998. But according to Justin Daniel, this is more a function of his association with effective management and good governance than of popular support for national independence (“L’espace politique martiniquais à l’épreuve de la départmentalisation” (“Martinican Political Space and the Test of Departmentalization”), in Constant and Daniel, 1946 – 1996, 250 – 52). (In 1999, along with the presidents of the Regional Councils of Guiana and Guadeloupe, Marie-Jeanne signed “La déclaration de Basse-Terre” demanding official autonomous status for the three departments.)

70. Césaire served as Martinique’s deputy to the National Assembly (1945 – 93), mayor of Fort-de-France (1945 – 2001), and president of the Conseil Général (1945 – 49, 1955 – 70) and the Conseil Régional (1983 – 86).

resentment in Martinique.67 The Left, which had formerly supported depart-mentalization, now struggled to revise the territory’s legal status. Autonomists, represented by Césaire’s PPM and the Martinican Communist Party, hoped to institute formal political autonomy without separating completely from France.68 Another nationalist strand of the Left demanded full political independence.69 Despite their wave of popularity during the 1970s, these independentist parties failed to attract a mass following. Césaire, by contrast, became the most power-ful politician in Martinique.70 But Gaullist policies during the 1960s and 1970s allowed the conservative Right in Martinique to derail all attempts to redefine the territory’s legal status. These departmentalists effectively manipulated fears that any change in status would be a first step toward political independence.

Untimely Vision

1 29

They warned that France would abandon its départements d’outre-mer (DOMs) and that Martinique’s economic security, social protections, and acquired rights would disappear.71

This political diagram changed again when in May 1981, following François Mitterrand’s presidential election, Césaire declared a moratorium on efforts to change Martinique’s legal status. This decision to collaborate with the metro-politan state was inspired by the Socialist government’s policy of decentralization through which substantial administrative powers devolved from Paris to organs of local governance in the DOMs. Decentralization, which officially sanctioned the regional “right to difference,” also funded Antillean cultural associations, media outlets, and programs to support cultural diversity and raise cultural conscious-ness.72 The 1980s and 1990s were indeed decades of intensive cultural reclama-tion marked by vigorous debates among metropolitan and overseas Antillean intellectuals and activists over cultural authenticity, whether refracted through négritude, antillanité, or créolité.73 Beginning in the late 1990s, this culturalist

71. On Gaullism in Martinique, see Miles, Elections and Ethnicity, 129 – 38; Daniel, “L’éspace politique,” 240 – 47; and Nicolas, Histoire de la Martinique, 64 – 85, 178 – 242. A survey of Antil-lean leaders conducted by Arvin W. Murch in the late 1960s indicated a high level of support for departmental status (“Political Integration as an Alternative to Independence in the French Antilles,” American Sociological Review 33 [1968]: 544 – 62). Such concerns led the Martinican public to vote against François Mitterrand in the May 1981 presidential elections despite the close alliance between the PPM and the French Socialist Party. William F. S. Miles, “Mitterrand in the Caribbean: Social-ism (?) Comes to Martinique,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 27, no. 3 (1985): 63 – 79. The same dynamic appears to have been at work in the December 7, 2003, referendum on whether to create a single territorial council, which was defeated by an electorate reluctant to make any adjustment to the department’s legal status. See Justin Daniel, “Les élus face à la réforme insti-tutionnelle et à l’acte II de la décentralisation: La difficile conciliation d’aspirations contradictoires” (“Elected Representatives Confronted with Institutional Reform and Act 2 of Decentralization: The Difficulty of Reconciling Contradictory Aspirations”), and Ulrike Zander, “La consultation du 7 décembre 2003 et les manifestations d’inquiétude de l’opinion martiniquaise” (“The Referendum of 7 December 2003 and Expressions of Anxiety in Martinican Public Opinion”), in Entre assimila-tion et émancipation: L’outre-mer français dans l’impasse? (Between Assimilation and Emancipa-tion: Overseas France at an Impasse?), ed. Thierry Michalon (Paris: Les Perséides, 2006), 113 – 31, 132 – 51. On this dynamic at work in Réunion, see Françoise Vergès, Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Métissage (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 123 – 84.

72. Miles, Elections and Ethnicity, 230 – 46; Constant, La retraite aux flambeaux, 141 – 221; Daniel, “L’espace politique martiniquais,” 233 – 37, 247 – 52; Yves Bernabé, Viviane Capgras, and Pascal Murgier, “Les politiques culturelles à la Martinique depuis la décentralisation” (“Cultural Policies in Martinique since Decentralization”), in Constant and Daniel, 1946 – 1996, 133 – 52; David Blatt, “Immigrant Politics in a Republican Nation,” in Postcolonial Cultures in France, ed. Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney (New York: Routledge, 1997), 40 – 58.

73. Alain Blérald, Négritude et politique aux Antilles (Negritude and Policy in the Antilles) (Paris: Éditions Caribéennes, 1981); Edouard Glissant, Le discours antillais (Antillean Discourse)

Public Culture

1 30

turn converged with a growing preoccupation with the historical memory of slav-ery, colonial violence, and anticolonial struggles in Martinique. Public debates unfolded over official commemorations and the state’s historical responsibility for past harms perpetrated against Antillean peoples.74

In Martinique there emerged a broad consensus that traversed classes and ide-ological positions and combined the rejection of cultural assimilation, an affirma-tion of regional specificity, and a commitment to ongoing integration within the French Republic. Popular support for the existence of a distinct “nation” grew, while the prospects of national independence or formal autonomy virtually disap-

(Paris: Seuil, 1981); Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, Eloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness) (Paris: Gallimard/Presses Universitaires Créoles, 1989); Raphaël Confi-ant, Aimé Césaire: Une traversée paradoxale du siècle (Aimé Césaire: A Paradoxical Crossing of the Century) (Paris: Stock, 1993); Maryse Condé, “Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer,” Yale French Studies, no. 83 (1993): 121 – 35; J. Michael Dash, Edouard Glissant (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, Jean Bernabé, and Lucien Taylor, “Creolité Bites,” Transition, no. 74 (1997): 124 – 61; Burton, “Idea of Difference”; Giraud, “De la négritude à la créolité”; Richard Price and Sally Price, “Shadowboxing in the Man-grove,” Cultural Anthropology 12 (1997): 3 – 36; David A. B. Murray, “The Cultural Citizen: Nega-tions of Race and Language in the Making of Martiniquais,” Anthropological Quarterly 70 (1997): 79 – 90; Beriss, Black Skin, French Voices, 67 – 104.

74. Such debates marked commemorations in 1998 of the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. This memorial spirit informed the 2001 loi Taubira, which classified slavery as a crime against humanity and mandated that the history of slavery be taught in French public schools. Fol-lowing the recommendations of the Comité pour la Mémoire de l’Esclavage, whose president was Maryse Condé, President Jacques Chirac established May 10 as an official holiday commemorating the abolition of slavery. The politics of memory also surrounded protests against the reprehensible Article 4 of the law of February 23, 2005, which publicly recognized the “positive” aspects of overseas French colonialism and mandated that they be taught to French schoolchildren. During this period a small but vocal campaign by Antilleans to demand that the state pay reparations to the descendants of French slaves emerged. Beriss, Black Skin, French Voices, 25 – 33, 51 – 54; Laurent Dubois, A Col-ony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787 – 1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 423 – 38; Comité pour la Mémoire de l’Esclavage, Mémoires de la traite négrière, de l’esclavage et de leurs abolitions (Memories of the Slave Trade, Slavery, and Their Abolition), April 12, 2005, www.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr/rapports -publics/054000247/index.shtml; Françoise Vergès, La mémoire enchaînée: Questions sur l’esclavage (Chained Memory: Questions about Slavery) (Paris: Michel, 2006); and in Esprit, no. 332 (2007), a special issue titled “Antilles: La république ignorée,” see Daniel Maximin, Stéphane Pocrain, and Christiane Taubira, “Quelle mémoire de l’esclavage? Table ronde” (“Which Memory of Slavery? Roundtable”), 62 – 70; Élisabeth Landi and Silyane Larcher, “La mémoire coloniale vue de Fort-de-France” (“Colonial Memory from the Perspective of Fort-de-France”), 84 – 97; Fred Constant, “Pour une lecture sociale des revendications mémorielles ‘victimaires’ ” (“Toward a Social Reading of ‘Victims’ Memorial Demands”), 105 – 16; and Patrick Weil, “Politique de la mémoire: L’interdit et la commémoration” (“Politics of Memory: Prohibition and Commemora-tion”), 124 – 43.

Untimely Vision

1 3 1

peared.75 But accommodation should not be equated with stagnation. The par-ticular challenge of integrating a postcolonial society into the national state had always entailed a process of pragmatic improvisation and adaptation. In Marti-nique the laws of the republic and its administrative forms were often reworked through a series of derogations, adjustments, and local preferences because of the specific conditions and needs of this anomalous “monodepartmental region” located in the Caribbean basin.76 In other words, departmentalization has entailed neither cultural assimilation to the French nation nor political assimilation to the unitary republic. Nor do reductive statements about neocolonial dependence grasp the peculiar character, both problematic and promising, of the complex political arrangement that has emerged over the past sixty years in the DOMs.

The political scientists Justin Daniel, Fred Constant, and Fred Reno demon-strate that Martinique under departmentalization has developed a distinct and autonomous juridico-political system that does not simply mirror its metropolitan

75. Daniel, “L’espace politique martiniquais,” 247 – 52; Emmanuel Jos, “Identité culturelle et identité politique: Le cas Martiniquais” (“Cultural Identity and Political Identity: The Case of Mar-tinicans”), in Constant and Daniel, 1946 – 1996, 335 – 71; Daniel, “Les élus face à la réforme insti-tutionnelle,” 123 – 37.

76. Civil servants in the DOM are paid the famous 40 percent premium over their colleagues in metropolitan agencies. Various forms of discrimination positive have extended opportunity preferences to Antillean populations regarding employment, training, and social security. In the Constitution of October 4, 1958, Article 73 allowed that in the DOMs the laws of the republic are subject to “adapta-tions according [tenant] to the particular characteristics and constraints of these collectivities” (www .conseil-constitutionnel.fr/textes/constit.htm). A decree on April 26, 1960, gave the Conseils Généraux in the Antilles a special right to advise the central government on legislation that will affect the DOMs in particular ways. The decentralization law of March 2, 1982, led local governmental structures in Martinique to continue to evolve in ways that distinguished it from the metropolitan model. A political struggle thereby commenced over the feasibility of competing governing bodies (the Conseil Général and the Conseil Régional) whose jurisdictions were geographically coextensive, as well as over the constitutionality of a novel “Assemblée Unique” for this peculiar “monodepartmental region.” Miles, Ethnicity and Elections, 231 – 34; Constant, La retraite aux flambeaux, 141 – 221. Decentralization has continued to evolve through the laws of July 5, 1994, and December 13, 2000; the constitutional revi-sions of March 28, 2003; the debate over Martinique’s legal status around the referendum of December 7, 2003; and the law of August 13, 2004. See François-Lubin, “Les méandres de la politique sociale outre-mer,” 83 – 93; Justin Daniel, ed., L’outre-mer à l’épreuve de la décentralisation: Nouveaux cadres institutionnels et difficultés d’adaptation (Overseas France and the Test of Decentralization: New Institutional Frameworks and the Difficulty of Adaptation) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007); and the essays collected in part 2 of Michalon, Entre assimilation et émancipation, 200 – 362. On legal autonomy, see Anne-Marie Le Pourhiet, “La perception du droit à la Martinique” (“Perceptions of the Law in Mar-tinique”), in Constant and Daniel, 1946 – 1996, 451 – 72; and Jack Vimon, “Assimilation et dédouble-ment des ordres normatifs: Le cas des Amérindiens de Guyane française” (“Assimilation and Divi-sion of Normative Orders: The Case of the Amerindians of French Guiana”), in Constant and Daniel, 1946 – 1996, 433 – 50.

Public Culture

1 3 2

counterpart and that allows for a large degree of independent maneuvering. They recognize that departmentalization created a system of economic and political subordination and that decentralization, in turn, opened the way to local clien-telism, party factionalism, and identitarianism. Yet their work also indicates that Martinique has come to enjoy a substantial degree of political autonomy and cul-tural integrity without sacrificing full citizenship and social protections within a democratic French republic. The system recognizes Martinican geographic and cultural specificity while allowing for movement and mixture. It also legally pro-tects the deep ties that link Antilleans to metropolitan society, the republican pol-ity, and European history.77 This unofficial movement toward legal pluralism and administrative diversity within a decentralized and multicultural French republic has been further complicated by the peculiar status of the Antillean departments in the EU as well as by their growing commitment to membership in a broader Caribbean region from which it had usually stood apart.78

77. Daniel, “L’espace politique martiniquais.” Other accounts of the specificity of the Martinican political system include Constant, La retraite aux flambeaux; Fred Reno, “La créolisation de l’espace publique à la Martinique” (“The Creolization of Public Space in Martinique”), in Constant and Daniel, 1946 – 1996, 405 – 32; and Reno, “Politics and Society in Martinique,” in Burton and Reno, French and West Indian, 34 – 47.

78. Daniel argues that the “autonomization of political space” has also led to its “enlargement,” creating a situation in which Martinique has developed multiple allegiances, identifying simulta-neously with the Antilles, the wider Caribbean, France, and the EU (“L’espace politique martini-quais,” 252). On the EU, see Emmanuel Jos, “The Declaration of the Treaty of Maastricht on the Ultra-peripheral Regions of the Community: An Assessment,” in Burton and Reno, French and West Indian, 86 – 97; and Daniel, “L’espace politique martiniquais,” 242 – 55. Departmentalization thus expanded the boundaries of “Europe” and created opportunities for Antilleans, as Europeans, to pursue their interests directly through the EU without the intermediation of the French state. Yet, because they are formal departments of France, the Antillean DOMs are excluded from many of the economic subsidies, development funding, and security pacts designed to aid “ultraperipheral” regions of the Union. And its already diminished agricultural economy is further threatened by a common market without protections from low-priced competitors. Historically, Martinique has been only weakly integrated into a Caribbean region, where it has enjoyed better living conditions, social protections, and political stability than its independent counterparts. On comparisons and connec-tions between the French Antillean DOMs and other Caribbean states, see Paul Sutton, ed., Dual Legacies in the Contemporary Caribbean: Continuing Aspects of British and French Dominion (London: Cass, 1986); Maurice Burac, “The French Antilles, and the Wider Caribbean,” in Burton and Reno, French and West Indian, 98 – 111; Fred Constant and Justin Daniel, eds., Politique et développement dans les Caraîbes (Policy and Development in the Caribbean) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), esp. Justin Daniel, “Crise ou mutations des institutions: La quête de nouveaux modèles” (“Cri-sis or Institutional Transformation: The Search for New Models”), 99 – 153; and Daniel, “Dével-oppement et compétition politique: Vers une mutation du modèle portoricain?” (“Development and Political Competition: Toward a Transformation of the Puerto Rican Model?”), in Les îles caraïbes: Modèles politiques et stratégíes de développement (The Caribbean Islands: Political Models and Strategies of Development) (Paris: Karthala, 1996), 185 – 223.

Untimely Vision

1 3 3

Césaire’s Legacy

Insofar as the system that actually evolved in Martinique has displaced, and not only reproduced, some of the precepts of unitary republicanism, we might say that many of Césaire’s initial hopes for departmentalization were eventually real-ized. But we cannot grasp Césaire’s legacy simply by examining the evident fail-ures and qualified successes of departmentalization. Rather, we need to think of departmentalization in relation to the broader vision and spirit of engagement that animated Césaire’s successive political projects. Moreover, Césaire’s postwar interventions were not only pragmatic and instrumental. They were also visionary, anticipatory, and utopian. We must therefore engage his legacy not only in terms of the departmentalization that came to be but in terms of the postcolonial federa-tion that might have been or the decentralized republic that might one day emerge. Instead of criticizing Césaire’s positions as outmoded from the standpoint of a nationalist logic of decolonization, we can develop a critique of that logic itself as outmoded from the standpoint of Césaire’s insights and interventions.

To inquire into Césaire’s legacy, then, is to recognize the residues and reso-nances of his concrete utopian commitment to confront colonial emancipation as an open-ended problem for which state sovereignty could not always serve as the presumptive solution. For Césaire, postcolonial freedom — understood in terms of self-management and economic liberty — would require political imagination and invention, not just the mechanical implementation of formal territorial indepen-dence. His spirit is thus present in projects that seek to convert formal liberty into substantive freedom by restructuring rather than rejecting the juridico-political part-nership between the overseas departments and a multicultural French republic — of which Antilleans have always been an integral part and on which they have enduring legal, material, and moral claims.

This political spirit will remain obscure as long as we reductively identify Césaire either as simply the nativist bard of Negritude, understood only as a cel-ebration of black subjectivity, or as the instrumental architect of departmentaliza-tion, understood only as a ruse for neocolonial dependency. This means that we cannot automatically associate Césaire’s legacy, as one might, with the range of Antillean nationalists and independentists who extend what they see as Negri-tude’s signal gesture, the rejection of cultural assimilation (even if they also criti-cize Césaire’s supposed focus on Africanity and his support for political assimi-lation). Concerned primarily with protecting and promoting a threatened Creole culture or national entity, their separatist orientation often leads these culturalists to criticize republicanism and universalism as foreign, hypocritical, or illusory. A

Public Culture

1 3 4

fixation on cultural authenticity generates a politics of identitarian, communitar-ian, and nationalist ressentiment and revendication that may or may not include demands for formal independence. For these nationalists, departmentalization signals cultural assimilation and colonial alienation. Leaders of these movements have also expressed hostility toward their Antillean counterparts settled in met-ropolitan France as well as discriminatory xenophobia toward immigrants from other Caribbean countries.79

It might then be more appropriate to recognize Césaire’s legacy in multiple currents of pragmatic politics that are unfolding along paths the poet-politician originally traced. An organization, such as the Conseil Représentatif des Associa-tions Noires — a federation of black French civic associations founded after the 2005 banlieu uprising by Patrick Lozès, a French citizen whose family was origi-nally from Benin — extends Césaire’s interwar attempt to create bonds of solidar-ity among metropolitans of African descent. On the legislative front, Christiane Taubira, a parliamentary deputy representing Guiana, extends Césaire’s postwar struggle to compel the French state to honor its historical debts to the former slave colonies through full citizenship and social equality. And Serge Letchimy, the current leader of the PPM, extends Césaire’s project to create conditions for postcolonial freedom in Martinique through economic development, cultural autonomy, and democratic self-management.80

But it is also important to recognize another group of heirs to Césaire who are less visible and vocal than the others but who enact his legacy in fundamental ways. In contrast to the politicians with whom they are often allied, they approach Antillean politics with an experimental and future-oriented sensibility that rejects a priori formulas for postcolonial freedom and Antillean sociability. In contrast to the nationalist and independentist figures whom they criticize forcefully, they are cosmopolitans committed to a postracial republicanism and multicultural democ-racy within a reconfigured France. I am thinking here of the Guadeloupean nov-elist Daniel Maximin, the Martinican political scientist Justin Daniel, and the sociologist Michel Giraud, a metropolitan of Guadeloupean descent.81

79. Michel Giraud, “Le malheur d’être partis” (“The Misfortune of Having Left”), Esprit, no. 332 (2007): 49 – 61.

80. See Serge Letchimy, Discours sur l’Autonomie (Discourse on Autonomy) (Martinique: Ibis Rouge, 2002); Patrick Lozès, Nous, les Noirs de France (We, the Blacks of France) (Paris: Danger Public, 2007); and Site Officiel de Christiane Taubira, Députée de Guyane, www.christiane-taubira .org (accessed November 10, 2008).

81. See Daniel, “L’espace politique martiniquais”; Daniel, “Crise ou mutations des institutions”; Giraud, “De la négritude à la créolité”; Giraud, “Le malheur d’être partis”; Michel Giraud, “Crispa-tion identitaire et antisémitisme: Le cas d’Antilla” (“Identitarian Retrenchment and Anti-Semitism:

Untimely Vision

1 3 5

These thinkers begin with a forceful critique of French racism, cultural assimi-lation, and the failures of departmentalization. They support the need to affirm Antillean distinctiveness and local autonomy. But while recognizing that stig-matized peoples have a legitimate right to recognition, they deplore how cultural claims have overwhelmed, evacuated, or co-opted political space in the Antilles since the 1980s. These cosmopolitans reject any communitarian retrenchment that would close off the Antilles from France or Europe or from its Caribbean and American neighbors. Regarding the fixation with either cultural authenticity or the DOMs’ legal status as political distractions, they do not believe that integral nationalism, let alone state sovereignty, will magically bestow economic devel-opment or democratic self-determination on Antillean peoples. On the contrary, they suggest that Antillean self-management, French citizenship, and transna-tional interdependence may require one another.

Impatient with facile rejections of republicanism or universalism (as Euro-centric), these thinkers suggest that support for full French citizenship honors the legacy and condenses the struggles of their slave and activist ancestors who pursued republican liberty and equality against the béké Right, which had long supported autonomy from the French state to protect béké racial hegemony in the Antilles. This is why they can understand political assimilation as expressing an enduring demand for social equality rather than the simple wish for cultural assimilation.

We might say that these cosmopolitan Césaireans attempt to universalize republican universality by deracializing it. They challenge its presumptive link to whiteness, France, or Europe even as they also root it in the particular history, conditions, and politics of the Antilles. Their writings suggest that the republican project is an indispensable element of their own heritage even as Antillean free-dom struggles are also indissociable aspects of France’s republican patrimony. For them, the overseas departments constitute the cutting edge of French repub-

The Case of Antilla”), Traces, no. 11 (1985): 129 – 51; Giraud, “Dialectics of Descent and Pheno-types in Racial Classification in Martinique,” in Burton and Reno, French and West Indian, 75 – 85; Giraud, “Sur l’assimilation: Les paradoxes d’un objet brouillé” (“On Assimilation: The Paradoxes of a Blurry Object”), in Michalon, Entre assimilation et émancipation, 89 – 102; Giraud, “L’arbre et la forêt: À propos de quelques polémiques récentes” (“The Forest and the Tree: Regarding Certain Recent Polemics”), Esprit, no. 332 (2007): 81 – 83; and Maximin, Pocrain, and Taubira, “Quelle mémoire de l’esclavage?” Mention should also be made of their frequent collaborator, the political scientist Fred Constant. It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss the important ways in which Edouard Glissant, from Martinique, and Maryse Condé, from Guadeloupe, continue to extend Cés-aire’s legacy as well.

Public Culture

1 3 6

licanism, expressing its deepest values and prefiguring its future forms.82 Rather than try to protect an idealized Creole culture overseas, they are alert to the radi-cal possibilities that may emerge through the créolisation of France itself. They recognize that democracy and development in the DOM will continue to require intercultural dialogue, reciprocity, and métissage, as well as political negotiation and partnership.

In short, these writers direct our attention to an underlying link between post-colonial freedom and postnational democracy.83 They are open to the political potential that may inhere in the imperfect kinds of experiments in legal pluralism, administrative decentralization, and shared sovereignty that historical conditions have compelled French Antilleans to pursue. Of course, they criticize the para-doxes, contradictions, and impasses that circumscribe Antillean public life. And they challenge the persistence of French racism and structural inequality in the Antilles. But they also embrace the ways in which the DOMs may function as an improvisational laboratory, where pluralist, autonomist, federalist, and confeder-alist arrangements with the French republic, the Caribbean region, and the Euro-pean Union can be worked out as the only viable path toward a social democratic future in an era of neoliberal globalization and postcolonial failure.

Just as Césaire was not naive about the imperial underpinnings of the French Union, we should not turn a blind eye to the limitations of departmentalization. But just as Césaire’s pragmatic interventions were guided by strategic utopian insights into what the French Union could possibly become, we must now try to imagine how actually existing departmentalization may point beyond itself toward an alternative form of federal democracy whose prospective realization Césaire had already envisioned. Viewed from the standpoint of the nationalist logic of decolonization, the French Antilles are typically seen as a neocolonial anachronism. But from our postnational vantage point, by way of an immanent critique, they also appear to anticipate a world to come. Here too, as in Scott’s

82. Michel Giraud and Patrick Weil, “À la pointe avancée de la République” (“At the Cutting Edge of the Republic”), Esprit, no. 332 (2007): 48; Maximin, Pocrain, and Taubira, “Quelle mémoire de l’esclavage?” 68 – 69.

83. On postnational democracy, see Jürgen Habermas, “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy,” in The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, ed. and trans. Max Pensky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 58 – 112; Habermas, “Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years’ Hindsight,” in Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cos-mopolitan Ideal, ed. James Bohman and Mattias Lutz-Bachmann (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 113 – 53; and Habermas, “Does the Constitutionalization of International Law Still Have a Chance?” in The Divided West, ed. and trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 115 – 93.

Untimely Vision

1 3 7

84. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 2:203 – 10; Arendt, “Preface: The Gap between Past and Future,” and “What Is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 2006), 3 – 15, 142 – 69.

account of James’s Louverture, the Caribbean functions as an exemplary scene of colonial modernity. And as in revolutionary Saint-Domingue, black French actors in the overseas departments must still grapple with a series of refractory dilem-mas and unsatisfying alternatives. But just because there may be no way out does not mean that there is no way forward.

For many African and Caribbean peoples, revolutionary nationalism and state sovereignty have proved inadequate media for postcolonial freedom. But Antil-lean attempts to overcome colonialism nonnationally through experiments in plu-ral democracy may reveal how political emancipation might still be meaningfully pursued. Césaire’s Caribbean, then, may serve not only as a symptom of trag-edy but as a democratic prophecy. His strategic utopian project for nonnational colonial emancipation — the legacy that he inherited and willed — should surely count as a fecund source for an effective history of our present through which to glimpse a possible future.

That the Caribbean continues to play the role of political avatar is reinforced by the fact that federalist and pluralist attempts to imagine and enact postnational democracy and cosmopolitan law are now pursued by political theorists, interna-tional lawyers, and progressive activists around the world. Innovative responses to the challenges posed by immigrants rights, French Islam, and European Union membership seek in various ways to move beyond unitary republicanism by disaggregating sovereignty and dissociating citizenship from nationality. Such experiments and proposals envision political forms located between an outmoded national state and an implausible global state through which to confront the pro-verbial democracy deficit of globalization and through which to overcome the persistent antinomy between national rights and human rights. The hope is to find a constitutional framework that may reconcile republican universality and cultural multiplicity. Such a political form might also link the kind of democratic participation and socioeconomic solidarity enabled by citizenship in a determi-nate political community, on the one hand, with planetary commitments to a world constitution, cosmopolitan democracy, and a global public sphere, on the other. Traversing such debates and proposals is the spirit of federalism, which now reappears fifty years after it flashed up in that historical opening between, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, the “no longer” of late colonialism and the “not yet” of the Cold War order.84

Public Culture

1 3 8

It has become evident that formal sovereignty cannot guarantee substantive freedom for many postcolonial societies. Global restructuring has disrupted entrenched assumptions about nations as natural containers for social relations and about nationality as the necessary horizon for political association and iden-tification. Such developments may free us from an outmoded logic of decoloniza-tion by creating, following Benjamin, a new “now of recognizability” through which postwar politics reappear and become differently legible.85 We might then be able to recognize Césaire’s imperfect initiatives for colonial overcoming and political emancipation, which have often been dismissed as neocolonial capitula-tion, as cosmopolitan and utopian attempts to awaken futures past and to antici-pate futures to come. To remember Césaire is to remember the future. It is to recall and pursue the unrealized future that he envisioned, one that lies simultane-ously behind us and ahead of us.

Coda: Remembering Césaire

To say that Césaire leaves a legacy attuned to the political power of transgen-erational remembrance is not to align him with the recent preoccupation with commemoration and historical memory. If Césaire recognized how practices of remembrance might fuel radical political projects, he also criticized the depoliti-cizing tendencies of official commemoration.86 He cultivated a dialogical relation-

85. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 475; Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 261, 262, 264.

86. In 1982 Césaire attacked the French Senate’s attempt to recuperate a proposal by Socialists to create a law commemorating the 1848 abolition of slavery (JORF, December 17, 1982). More recently, he expressed reservations about the Antillean reparations movement on the grounds that it reinforced a “victimization” mentality and risked trivializing the historical trauma by suggesting that an irreparable moral debt could simply be paid off with cash and the matter would appear to be set-tled (Césaire, Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai, 39 – 40). In response to the homages organized in honor of his ninetieth birthday, Césaire commented, “Listen, I am not very fond of these ceremonies. . . . I am not a man of ceremonial display [l’homme de l’étalage cérémoniel].” Patrice Louis, Conver-sation avec Aimé Césaire (Paris: Arléa, 2007), 73. Césaire did not support the move by Alfred Jeanne-Marie to change the name of the historic Lycée Victor Schoelcher to the Lycée Aimé Césaire. See Landi and Larcher, “La mémoire coloniale vue de Fort-de-France,” 84 – 89. Césaire was both a graduate of and a teacher at this school, where his students famously included Frantz Fanon and Edouard Glissant. On October 10, 2007, Césaire sent an urgent demand to the government to clas-sify the Lycée Victor Schoelcher as a protected bâtiment historique insofar as it was “a historical monument” and “a historic document” that “bears witness” to both the struggle for abolition waged by Schoelcher in the 1840s and the generations of intellectuals and leaders taught there since the 1930s. Aimé Césaire to Christine Albanel, Ministre de la Culture et de la Communication, October 10, 2007, www.ppm-martinique.net/Lycee-Schoelcher-Lettre-d-Aime-Cesaire-a-Christine-Albanel -Ministre-de-la-Culture-et-de-la-Communication_a190.html.

Untimely Vision

1 3 9

ship to the past not to memorialize a fixed heritage but to call forth a world that did not yet exist. Given Césaire’s skepticism about commemoration as politics, we can speculate that he would have had misgivings about the public campaign to have his own remains buried in France’s Panthéon after his death on April 17, 2008.87 If so, it is not likely that his objection would have been based on the premise that cultural icons must be buried on natal soil (as metropolitan and Mar-tinican opponents to the idea, on both the right and the left, suggested). Rather, it would probably have followed from his concern that official commemoration could blunt the political edge of revolutionary actors precisely by turning them into national icons.

In fact, Césaire’s actual state funeral on April 20, 2008, in Fort-de-France avoided this reifying process. His death was the occasion for cultural ritual and collective solidarity. Supporters ceremoniously drove his coffin through the city to the stadium where his funeral would be held, making frequent symbolic stops in popular neighborhoods and before the Hôtel de Ville. The procession was greeted and followed by emotional crowds, much larger than expected, who expressed joy and grief through singing, chanting, and dancing. French, Antillean, Caribbean, and African notables attended. The proceedings were broadcast live across the international Francophone world. But organizers ensured that this would be nei-ther an occasion for political recuperation nor one instrumentalized for nationalist ends.88

The centerpiece of the funeral celebration, opened by Césaire’s longtime com-rade Pierre Aliker and presided over by his younger friend Daniel Maximin, was a dramatic “evocation of Césaire.”89 Maximin staged the event as an intimate dialogue between Césaire and his mourners. Rather than consign him to the dead, Maximin invoked the living spirit of Césaire: “Your voice is still here, present among us, a powerful presence that rises up to the stars, a profound presence that

87. This campaign, which received little support from either Martinicans or the French govern-ment, was promoted by the Antillean activist Claude Ribbe and supported by prominent French politicians like François Bayrou and Ségolène Royale. See Claude Ribbe, “Césaire, ‘normalien noir,’ au Panthéon le 10 mai 2008!” (“Césaire, ‘Black Normalien,’ in the Panthéon on May 10, 2008!”), April 25, 2008, www.afrik.com/article14141.html. See also Claude Ribbe’s blog at www.claude-ribbe .com/dotclear.

88. President Nicolas Sarkozy attended but was not invited to speak. In protest against Sarkozy’s support for the 2005 law on the positive aspects of French colonialism, Césaire had earlier refused to meet with him when he visited Martinique. The following year, after the objectionable articles of this law had been eliminated, Césaire did meet with him.

89. Aliker declared that Martinique had lost its greatest son, someone who understood that Mar-tinicans are the only specialists of Martinique.

Public Culture

1 40

descends down to the coral at the bottom of the sea.” Especially effective was how Maximin alternated between speaking casually, affectionately, and directly to Césaire in the familiar tu form about various stages of his life and orchestrating Césaire’s presence through dramatic readings of his poetry and plays by speak-ers from Martinique, Guadeloupe, Senegal, and Haiti. Between each recitation Maximin would declare, “Césaire, beloved, speak now [Césaire, aimé, parole due].”90 His descendants thus addressed the living spirit of Césaire in the very way that Césaire himself had conjured and engaged the spirits of Schoelcher and Louverture.91 As Césaire’s casket was taken away to the cemetery, the mourning public gathered in the stadium continued to chant “Béïa pour Césaire” (Long live Césaire).

Not only the form of the funeral but the content of Maximin’s moving com-mentary enacted Césaire’s legacy by evoking the indissociable relations between Martinican specificity and universal humanity, violence and reconciliation, suf-fering and hope, poetic imagination and political engagement, aesthetic freedom and social justice, rootedness and anticipation, loss and life, remembrance and renovation. The issue of historical temporality was further underscored when Maximin reminded the audience that what Césaire wanted above all for Marti-nique was not le devoir de mémoire (the duty to remember) but le droit à l’histoire (the right to history).

How then to remember this radical critic of memory whose politics were so attuned to historicity and futurity? Perhaps we could paraphrase his 1948 remarks on Schoelcher and say that it would be vain to commemorate Césaire unless we are prepared to imitate his politics. And paraphrasing his observations about Lou-verture’s untimely death, we might say that Césaire’s most revolutionary political act was to have sacrificed his status (as anticolonial icon) for our future.

90. Maximin is here invoking “Parole due,” one of Césaire’s last published poems (1993). I fol-low Annette Smith’s idiosyncratic translation of “parole due” as “speak now,” though, as Laurent Dubois has pointed out to me, it could also mean “words owed.” See Annette Smith, “ ‘A Man Was Here’: Aimé Césaire Revisited,” Research in African Literatures 37 (2006): 125, 128, 134.

91. Glissant writes that “it may be useful to point out that Toussaint’s relations with his deceased companions arise from a tradition, perhaps particular to the Antilles, of casual communication with the dead” (Monsieur Toussaint, 16).