freedom time by gary wilder

8/10/2019 Freedom Time by Gary Wilder

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FREEDOM TIMENegritude, Decolonization,and the Future of the World


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FREEDOM TIMENegritude, Decolonization,and the Future o the World

Duke University Press Durham and London 2015


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2015 Duke University Press All rights reserved

Printed in the United States o America on acid-ree paper

Designed by Courtney Leigh Bakerypeset in Univers by Westchester Book Group

Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wilder, Gary.Freedom time : Negritude, decolonization, and the uture o the world / Gary Wilder.pages cmIncludes bibliographical re erences and index.

978-0-8223-5839-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 978-0-8223-5850-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 978-0-8223-7579-1 (e-book)

1. Csaire, Aim. 2. Senghor, Lopold Sdar, 19062001.3. FranceColoniesA rica20th century.4. FranceColoniesAmerica20th century.5. Negritude (Literary movement). I. itle. 1818.w553 2015325'.3dc23

2014040365

Cover art: (top) Lopold Senghor. Felix Man/Picture Post/Getty Images; (bottom) AimCsaire. Mario Dondero.


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In memoriam Marilyn Wilder & Fernando Coronil


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NON-TIME IMPOSES ON TIME THE TYRANNY OF ITS SPATIALITY.


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xi xv

1 Unthinking France, Rethinking Decolonization 1

2 Situating Csaire 17 Antillean Awakening and Global Redemption

3 Situating Senghor 49 African Hospitality and Human Solidarity

4 Freedom, ime, erritory 74

5 Departmentalization and the Spirit o Schoelcher 106

6 Federalism and the Future o France 133

7 Antillean Autonomy and the Legacy o Louverture 167

8 A rican Socialism and the Fate o the World 206

9 Decolonization and Postnational Democracy 241

261 275 333 373

CONTENTS


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Tis book was born o an intuition while writing a con erence paper about

Aim Csaires nonnational orientation to decolonization. I wondered whether it would make sense to suggest that the Haitian Revolution exempli-ed Marxs subsequent demand that the new social revolution draw its po-

etry rom the uture. All I wanted was one quote rom oussaint Louvertureto set up a discussion o why Csaire committed himsel to departmentaliza-tion in 1946. But I ell into a deep rabbit hole.

I reread JamessTe Black Jacobins , MarxsTe Eigh teenth Brumaire , DuBoiss Black Reconstruction , and, o course, Csaires writings about abolition and de-

colonization. Te conjuncture o reedom struggles and historical temporality inthese texts led me back to Walter Benjamin, Teodor Adorno, and Ernst Bloch.Csaire was helping me grasp their arguments in a new way, and vice versa.

I had regarded this paper as un nished business, a loose thread danglingrom the edge o the book I had recently published on the interwar matrix out

o which the Negritude movement emerged. But the more I pulled, the longerit got. I suspected that I should make mysel stop but was unable to containthe ascinating mess. My twenty-ve-page paper blossomed into a fy-pageessay, which then grew into a two-hundred-page pile. I wondered whether it would be wiser to just write the paper on Lopold Sdar Senghors nonna-tionalist thoughts about decolonization. So I read his parliamentary speeches

rom the orties and fies and began to puzzle over what he meant by ederal-ism and what relation it might have with departmentalization. I read Proud-hon and revisited Marxs On the Jewish Question. When I then turned backto Csaires parliamentary interventions I realized, with some misgiving, thatI was now acing a book on reedom, time, and decolonization. I concededthat I was not nished writing about Csaire and Senghor. Butthis book, Ithought, on gures whom I already knew, would be comparatively quick andeasy. Hah!

PREFACE


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Tat was the summer o 2006, a moment when I was personally preoccupied with time and reckoning, opening and oreclosure, potentiality and loss . . .pasts conditional and utures anterior. I began writing that original paper whilerecovering rom major surgery to robotically repair a severely leaking heart valve. Tis was only a ew months afer I became a parent and lost a parent

ollowing an unraveled year not knowing whether I would miss my daughters birth in Cali ornia because I was saying good- bye to my dying mother in New York or miss the chance to say good- bye to her because I was attending to anewborn.

By then, a ew events had already been moving me into the intellectualspace rom which this book was written. Tese included a 2001 con erence inGuadeloupe about the legacy o slavery, organized by Laurent Dubois; this

was where I rst wrote about temporal legacies and spoke with Michel Gi-raud. Te 2005 session o the Irvine Summer in Experimental Critical Teory,hosted by David Teo Goldberg, where, nourished by discussions with Di-pesh Chakrabarty, Lisa Lowe, and Achille Mbembe, I presented a speculativetalk on the decolonization that might have been. And a 2006 con erence onimperial debris, organized by Ann Stoler at the New School, or which I rst wrote about Csaire and oussaint.

Equally catalyzing were the Critical Teory Group at Pomona College;

the seminars I taught at Pomona on the History and Politics o ime, De-colonization, and Postcolonial France; the year I spent on a Mellon NewDirections Fellowship as a Visiting Fellow o the Human Rights Program atHarvard Law School, where I audited international law classes with DavidKennedy and grappled with questions o global politics and planetary justice with Mindy Roseman and a group o international lawyers and activists thenin residence rom Brazil, Iran, Kenya, and Palestine; and the opportunity toshare and discuss my work on Csaire with Michel Giraud, Justin Daniel, JeanCrusol, and their colleagues in the Department o Law and Economy at theUniversit des Antilles et de la Guyane.

I then reworked a rough version o this manuscript in my new intellectualhome at the Graduate Center, where I am now a member o the anthro-pology PhD program and director o the Mellon Committee on Globalizationand Social Change. Tis has been an especially rich intellectual milieu that hasprovided a space or the kind o transdisciplinary inquiry and collaborativecommunity that Id only dreamt about. Te has also allowed me to workclosely with inspiring doctoral students rom whom I am constantly learning.

Te journey to and through this book was also in ected by worldly de- velopments. As the contours o my particular questions, object, and argu-


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ment became clearer to me, concerns that seemed to emerge rom a personalcrucible, I realized that academic discussions about temporality, utopianism,and potentialities were un olding in all directionsand this at a moment oconverging crises. An apocalyptic sense o impending global catastrophe atthe intersection o nancial, political, and ecological breakdown. On the lefa reluctance to name or envision the kind o world or li e or which it is worthstruggling, even as popular and horizontal antiauthoritarian and anticapital-ist movements surged worldwide. Intellectually, a sense that critical theorymay have reached certain impasses regarding how to think radical democracy

or these times partly by recuperating concepts such as reedom, autonomy,and justice, and above all Marxs human emancipation. It struck me that wedo not have a robust critical language with which to speak postnational de-

mocracy, translocal solidarity, and cosmopolitan politics in ways that havenot already been instrumentalized by human rights, humanitarianism, andliberal internationalism.

In some wayFreedom ime proceeds rom the same basic point as my rst book,Te French Imperial Nation-State. For twentieth-century A rican and Antillean populations there did not exist a simple outside rom which tocontest empire or pursue different utures, an outside that was not alreadymediated by relations o colonial domination. In my rst book this starting

point led to an analysis o the disabling antinomies o colonial racism andthe impossible situations that they created. Situations that Senghor, Csaire,and their cohort negotiated and re ected upon. Tat same starting point hasnow led me away rom a critique o impossibility and toward a re ection onutopian potentiality. It provides the basis or taking seriously Senghors andCsaires attention to the trans ormative possibilities that may have beensedimented within existing arrangementsas well as their hope, throughdecolonization, to remake the world so that humanity could more ully real-ize itsel on a planetary scale. Tat starting point has provoked the concernin this book with critical history as a dialogue with past and uture and withpolitics as practices oriented toward pasts present, not yet realized legacies,and supposed impossibilities that may be already at hand.

Tis book eels overdue; I am past ready to abandon it. At the same time Ialso eel like I might just now be ready to begin writing it.


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Much o this book was written thanks to the Mellon Foundations shockingly

generous New Directions Fellowship. It owes singular debts to Laurent Du- bois, who talked me through almost every step o this project and read care-ully two versions o this manuscript; Fernando Coronil, thanks to whom I

am at the Graduate Centerhis belie in my work was sustaining, and hisintellectual spirit inspiring; Susan Buck-Morss, a passionate and committedthinker, with whom I have enjoyed the adventure o intellectual collabora-tion; and Louise Lennihan, whose extraordinary efforts have made me athome at the Graduate Center. Special thanks are due to Souleymane Bachir

Diagne, Jean Casimir, Mamadou Diou , Michel Giraud, and Achille Mbembe,specialists in the areas that I explore, whose encouragement and suggestionsmade all the difference.

My thinking in this book has been incubated through dialogue withdear riends and colleagues whose insights have been invaluable gifs: DanBirkholz, Yarimar Bonilla, Mayanthi Fernando, Jenni er Friedlander, VinayGidwani, Manu Goswami, Philip Gourevitch, Henry Krips, Jeffrey Melnick,Paul Saint- Amour, Marina Sitrin, Judith Surkis, Massimiliano omba, andMatthew rachman. It has bene ted greatly rom discussions with colleagues who humble me with their intelligence and generosity: notably Anthony Alessandrini, alal Asad, Herman Bennett, Claire Bishop, KandiceChuh, John Collins, Vincent Crapanzano, Gerald Creed, Duncan Faherty,Sujatha Fernandes, David Harvey, Dagmar Herzog, Mandana Limbert, Mi-chael Menser, Uday Singh Mehta, Julie Skurksi, and Neil Smith. Stellar doc-toral students who commented on sections include Neil Agarwal, James Blair,Lydia Brassard, Megan Brown, Ezgi Canpolat, Jill Cole, Jenni er Corby, SamDaly, Mark Drury, Melis Ece, Mohammed Ezzeldin, imothy Johnson, Ahilan Kadirgamar, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, Fiona Lee, Shea McManus,

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


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Amiel Melnick, Junaid Mohammed, Andy Newman, Kareem Rabie, JeremyRayner, Ahmed Shari , Samuel Shearer, Chelsea Shields, and Frances ran.

I had the good ortune to present various pieces to engaged audiences atColumbia University, Cornell, Graduate Center, Duke, Hanyang Uni- versity (Korea), Harvard, Northwestern, the New School, , Princeton,the University o Chicago, University College, Cork (Ireland), the Universityo Missouri (Columbia), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), Universitdes Antilles et de la Guyane (Martinique), the University o Stirling (Scotland),the University o exas Austin, Yale, and Wesleyan. For their invitations andcomments I am grate ul to Nadia Abu El-Haj, Vanessa Agard- Jones, Mama-dou Badiane, Ed Baring, Benjamin Brower, Kamari Clarke, Frederick Coo-per, Michaeline Crichlow, Patrick Crowley, Michael Dash, Gregson Davis,

Brent Edwards, Charles Forsdick, Duana Fulwilley, Kaiama Glover, BrianGoldstone, Julie Hardwick, Antony Hopkins, Abiola Irele, Stephen Jacob-son, Deborah Jenson, Alice Kaplan, Sudipta Kaviraj, rica Keaton, EthanKleinberg, Yun Kyoung Kwon, Laurie Lambert, Brian Larkin, Mary Lewis, Jie-Hyun Lim, essie Liu, Claudio Lomnitz, Anne-Maria Makhulu, GregoryMann, Bill Marshall, Joe Masco, racie Matysik, Al red McCoy, Julia Mick-enberg, Sam Moyn, David Murphy, Nick Nesbitt, Patricia Northover, CharliePiot, Franois Richard, Kristin Ross, Emmanuelle Saada, David Scott, Jer-

rold Segal, Charad Shari, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Ann Laura Stoler, ylerStovall, Stephen yre, Aarthi Vaade, Frederic Viguier, Patricia Wald, and JiniKim Watson.

Much needed last-minute research assistance was offered by Jessie Fred-lund, and heroic editorial work by Clare Fentress and Andrew Billingsley.Tanks are due to Willa Armstrong, Elizabeth Ault, Amy Ruth Buchanan, Chris-topher Robinson, Jessica Ryan, and Ken Wissoker at Duke University Press.

My deepest gratitude is reserved or Paula Gorlitz, or showing me the di -erence between a setback and a catastrophe; Arthur Wilder, my beacon or

how to be human; Rachel Lindheim, whose sharp insights, un agging belie ,loving patience, and inspiring midcareer bravery nourished my writing; andIsabel Wilder, whose boundless heart, vitality, and imagination compel me tolive in the present and believe in the uture.


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ONE Unthinking France, Rethinking Decolonization

An emancipated society . . . would not be a unitary state, but the realization ouniversality in the reconciliation o differences.

Tis book is about the problem o reedom afer the end o empire. Te title

re ers not only to the postwar moment as a time or colonial reedom but tothe distinct typeso time and peculiar political tenses required or enabled by decolonization. Decolonization raised undamental questions or subjectpeoples about the rameworks within which sel -determination could bemeaning ully pursued in relation to a given set o historical conditions. Tese were entwined with overarching temporal questions about the relationship between existing arrangements, possible utures, and historical legacies. Te year 1945 was a world-historical opening; the contours o the postwar order were not yet xed, and a range o solutions to the problem o colonial eman-cipation were imagined and pursued. At the same time, the converging pres-sures o anticolonial nationalism, European neocolonialism, American global-ism, and UN internationalism made it appear to be a oregone conclusion thatthe postwar world would be organized around territorial national states.

Freedom ime tells this story o opening and oreclosure through unrealizedattempts by French A rican and Antillean legislators and intellectuals duringthe Fourth and Fifh Republics to invent orms o decolonization that wouldsecure sel -determination without the need or state sovereignty. Central tothis account are Aim Csaire rom Martinique and Lopold Sdar Senghor

rom Senegal who, between 1945 and 1960, served as public intellectuals,


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party leaders, and deputies in the French National Assembly. Teir proj-ects proceeded rom a belie that late imperialism had created conditions ornew types o transcontinental political association. Tey hoped to overcomecolonialism without alling into the trap o national autarchy. Teir consti-tutional initiatives were based on immanent critiques o colonialismand republicanism, identi ying elements within each that pointed beyond theirexisting orms. Tey not only criticized colonialism rom the standpoint oconstitutional democracy and sel -government; they also criticized unitaryrepublicanism rom the standpoint o decentralized, interdependent, plural,and transnational eatures o imperialism itsel .

In different ways Csaire and Senghor hoped to ashion a legal and po-litical ramework that would recognize the history o interdependence be-

tween metropolitan and overseas peoples and protect the latters economicand political claims on a metropolitan society their resources and labor hadhelped to create. Rather than allow France and its ormer colonies to be rei-

ed as independent entities in an external relationship to each other, the task was to institutionalize a long-standing internal relationship that would persisteven afer a legal separation. Tey were not simply demanding that overseaspeoples be ully integrated within the existing national state but proposing atype o integration that would reconstitute France itsel , by quietly exploding

the existing national state rom within. Legal pluralism, disaggregated sover-eignty, and territorial disjuncture would be constitutionally grounded. Tepresumptive unity o culture, nationality, and citizenship would be ruptured.

Given these colonies entwined relationship with metropolitan society, de-colonization would have to trans orm all o France, continental and over-seas, into a different kind o political ormationspeci cally, a decentralizeddemocratic ederation that would include ormer colonies as reely associatedmember states. Tis would guarantee colonial emancipation and model analternative global order that would promote civilizational reconciliation andhuman sel -realization. At stake, or them, was the very uture o the world.

Re using to accept thedoxa that sel -determination required state sover-eignty, their interventions proceeded rom the belie that colonial peoplescannot presume to know a priori which political arrangements would best allowthem to pursue substantive reedom. Yet this pragmatic orientation was insep-arable rom a utopian commitment to political imagination and anticipatorypolitics through which they hoped to transcend the very idea o France, re-make the world, and inaugurate a new epoch o human history. Teir proj-ects were at once strategic and principled, gradualist and revolutionary, realistand visionary, timely and untimely. Tey pursued the seemingly impossible


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through small deliberate acts. As i alternative utures were already at hand,they explored the ne line between actual and imagined, seeking to inventsociopolitical orms that did not yet exist or a world that had not yet arrived,although many o the necessary conditions and institutions were already pres-ent. Tis proleptic orientation to political uturity was joined to a parallelconcern with historicity. Tey proclaimed themselves heirs to the legacies ounrealized and seemingly outmoded emancipatory projects.

Tis book may be read in at least two ways. On one level, it is an intellec-tual history o Aim Csaire and Lopold Senghor between 1945 and 1960. Assuch, it extends the account provided in my last book o the genesis o the Ne-gritude project in the 1930s in relation to a new orm o colonial governancein French West A rica, the political rationality o postliberal republicanism,

and the development o a transnational black public sphere in imperial Paris. Freedom ime ollows that story into the postwar period, when these student-poets became poet-politicians participating directly in reshaping the contourso Fourth and Fifh Republic France and pursuing innovative projects orsel -determination. On another level, it attempts to thinkthrough their workabout the processes and problems that de ned their world and continue tohaunt ours. Teir writings on A rican and Antillean decolonization may also be read as re ections on the very prospect o democratic sel -management,

social justice, and human emancipation; on the relationship between reedomand time; and on the links between politics and aesthetics. Tey attempted totranscend conventional oppositions between realism and utopianism, mate-rialism and idealism, objectivity and subjectivity, positivism and rationalism,singularity and universality, culture and humanity. Te resulting conceptionso poetic knowledge, concrete humanism, rooted universalism, and situatedcosmopolitanism now appear remarkably contemporary. Teir insights, longtreated as outmoded, do not only speak to people interested in black criticalthought, anticolonialism, decolonization, and French A rica and the Antilles.Tey also warrant the attention o those on the lef now attempting to rethinkdemocracy, solidarity, and pluralism beyond the limitations o methodologi-cal nationalism and the impasses o certain currents o postcolonial and post-structural theory.

Decolonization beyond Methodological Nationalism

Historians have long treated decolonization as a series o dyadic encounters be-tween imperial states and colonized peoples: the ormer are gured as power ulnations possessing colonial territories, and the latter as not yet independent


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nations ruled by oreign colonizers. Such stories are ofen tethered to parallelaccounts o nation ormation. Whether ocused on European powers or Tird World peoples, policymakers or social movements, international strategy orpolitical economy, a certain methodological nationalism has persisted in thisscholarship. But to presuppose that national independence is the necessary

orm o colonial emancipation is to mistake a product o decolonization oran optic through which to study it.

Rather than evaluate decolonization rom the standpoint o supposedly nor-mal national states, this book seeks to historicize the postwar logic that reducedcolonial emancipation to national liberation and sel -determination to statesovereignty. It does so in part by recognizing that decolonization was an ep-ochal process o global restructuring that un olded on a vast political terrain

inhabited by diverse actors and agencies. Te outcome o this process was thesystem o ormally equivalent nation-states around which the postwar order was organized.

Historical accounts typically ocus on stories o con rontations betweennational states losing overseas possessions and oppressed nations winning in-dependence. Debates ofen ocus on decolonizations causes, mechanisms, oroutcomes as well as the so-called trans er o power. However important, thesediscussions tend to treat the meaning o decolonization as sel -evident by re-

ducing colonial emancipation to national liberation. Underlying such dyadicaccounts is the assumption that European stateshad empires but were notthemselves empires.

Alternatively, an approach that begins with empire as an optic emphasizesthe real, i problematic, ways that colonized peoples were members o impe-rial political ormations. It proceeds rom the act that European states did notsimply surrender colonies but abandoned their overseas populations. Decol-onization was among other things a deliberate rending whereby populations were separated, polities divided, and communities disen ranchised. Ratherthan ocus on the mechanisms, pace, or implementation o national indepen-dence or colonized peoples, histories o decolonization should inquire intothe range o political orms that were imagined and ashioned during what was a process o economic restructuring and political realignment on a globalscale. Historians have recently demonstrated that however important libera-tion struggles and metropolitan trans ormations were in the process o decolo-nization, colonized peoples and European policymakers were not always theprimary actors in this drama. Other agentsthe United States, the SovietUnion, China, the United Nations, international public opinion were no


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less important in dismantling Europes empires and creating the neocolonialsystem that would succeed them.

Histories that do not start with methodological nationalism can also ocusless on who may have helped or hindered programs or state sovereignty thanon the various ways that colonial actors con ronted reedom as a problem with no intrinsic solution. Public struggles over the shape o the postwar world questioned the meanings o terms long treated as synonyms: reedom,liberty, emancipation, independence, sovereignty, sel -determination, and au-tonomy. Tis study attends to the historical processes through which theseterms came to re er to one another. It does so by engaging seriously Csairesand Senghors attempts to ashion political orms that were democratic, social-ist, and intercontinental. Tis method osters an appreciation o the novelty

o their attempts to envision new orms o cosmopolitanism, humanism,universalism, and planetary reconciliation, orms that were concrete, rooted,situated, and embodied in lived experiences and re racted through particular but porous li eworlds.

Unthinking France, Working through Empire

Te French Imperial Nation-State was less concerned with the amiliar act that

the republican nation-state exercised autocratic rule over colonized peoplesthan with how imperial history had trans ormed the republican nation into aplural polity composed o multiple cultural ormations, administrative regimes,and legal systems. Such multiplicity also enabled novel types o political as-sociation, identi cation, and intervention. Te crucial question was not howFrance behaved overseas or how its populations experienced colonial rule.Rather, it was how the act o empire, including how colonial subjects re ectedupon it, invites us to radically rethink France itsel . I suggested we ollow thelead o the expatriate student poets associated with the Negritude project whosince the mid-1930s grappled with the imperial orm o the interwar republic.In contrast,Freedom ime explores how French imperialism created conditions

or an alternative ederal democracy that might have been. Underlying both works is a challenge to the methodological nationalism that ofen conditionsthe study o French colonial empire. Tey proceed rom the conviction thathistorians should not simply turn their research attention to colonial topics; we need to do so in ways that turn inside out the very category France.

Freedom ime again engages the contradiction between France as an actu-ally existing imperial nation-state and the territorial national categories that


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they are writing. Working through thus also implies a sel -re exive distancerom the object rather than an unthinking identi cation with it. Aim Csaire and Lopold Senghor spent their public lives working

through empire and unthinking France in just these ways. Proceeding romthe insight that A ricans and Antilleans were integral parts o the (imperial)nation, they re used to accept that France re erred to a metropolitan entityor a European ethnicity. Tey rejected the idea that they existed outside radi-cal traditions o French politics and thought. Even as student-poets in the1930s, they did not simply call or political inclusion but made a deeper de-mand that France accommodate itsel legally and politically to the interpen-etrated and interdependent realities its own imperial practices had produced.

reating imperial conditions as the starting point or emancipatory projects,

they claimed France as theirs and thus challenged the unitary and territorial-ist assumptions upon which the national state had long depended.Tough their decolonization projects differed, Csaire and Senghor were

more interested in reclaiming and re unctioning than rejecting the categoriesand orms that mediated their subjection. Tis recalls Adornos insight aboutthe revolutionary effi cacy o a literalness that explodes [an object] by tak-ing it more exactly at its word than it does itsel , an approach we might callthe politics oradical literalism. Csaire and Senghor repeatedly insisted that

whilethey did not eel alienated rom French and France, those who assumedthat they should whether on the lef or rightneeded to revise their ownunderstanding o these categories. Teir politics o radical literalism thus linkedimmanent critique to poetic imagination, aiming less to negate the empire orthe republic than to sublate and supersede them. Rather than counterposeautarchic notions o A rica, the Carib bean, or blackness to a one-dimensional

gure o France, they claimed within France those trans ormative legaciesto which they were right ul heirs and attempted to awaken the sel -surpassingpotentialities that they saw sedimented within it. Rather than ound separatenational states, they hoped to elevate the imperial republic into a democratic

ederation. Without understanding this distinctive orientation to anticolonialism, it

is diffi cult to appreciate the political speci city o Csaires and Senghorspragmatic-utopian visions o sel -determination without state sovereignty.Teir radically literalist approach to decolonization cannot be ully grasped without understanding their aesthetic orientation to images as sel -surpassingobjects. For example, when they invoke France in their postwar legislation,criticism, or poetry they are ofen re erring not to the existing national state but to the uture ederation they hoped to create.


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Deterritorializing Social Tought

Csaire and Senghor were canny readers o their historical conjuncture in re-lation to the macrohistorical trends o imperial history. Like many o theircontemporariesTird World nationalists, regionalists, panethnicists, and so-cialist internationaliststhey were acutely aware that decolonization wouldentail the recon guration rather than the elimination o imperial domination.But rather than offer a territorial response to this threat, they ormulated ep-ochal projections and projects. Teir ambition exceeded a commitment toprotecting the liberty and improving the lives o the populations they repre-sented. Tey also elt themselves to be implicated in and responsible or re-making the world and redeeming humanity. Teir interventions thus remind

us that during the postwar opening, the world-making ambition to reconceptu-alize and reorganize the global order was not the exclusive preserve o imperialpolicymakers, American strategists, international lawyers, or Tird Interna-tional Communists. But to even recognize this dimension o anticolonialismrequires us to move beyond the dubious but entrenched assumption thatduring decolonization many in the West thought globally while colonizedpeoples thought nationally, locally, concretely, or ethnicallyand those thatdidnt were somehow inauthentic.

Scholarship long promoted one-sided understandings o Csaire and Sen-ghor as either essentialist nativists or naive humanists. ied to the territo-rialism that dominated histories o decolonization, Negritude, whether em- braced or criticized, was treated as an affi rmative theory o A ricanity ratherthan a critical theory o modernity. Scholars have typically viewed their writ-ings as expressions o black subjectivity or anticolonialism and read their po-litical proposals reductively, seeking in ormation or messages, or in relationto Csaires or Senghors public recordsafer decolonization.

LikeTe French Imperial Nation-State , this book endorses more recentattempts to understand these gures writings as multi aceted engagements with modern politics, philosophy, and critical theory. I extend the effort omy earlier book to treat Csaire and Senghor as situated thinkers whose re-

ections illuminate not only the black French or colonial condition but theirown historical epoch and the larger sweep o political modernity by engagingthe elemental categories around which political li e at various scales was orga-nized. Regarding them as epochal thinkers and would- be world makers whograppled with global problems at a historical turning point raises questionsabout territorial assumptions underlying strong currents in both European his-toriography and postcolonial criticism, assumptions that ofen lead scholars


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to relate texts to the ethnicity, territory, or ormal political unit to which theirauthors appear to belong or re er.

Critics ofen treat Csaire or Senghor as representatives o black thoughtor A rican philosophy whose thinking may have beenin uenced by French orEuropean ideas but whose writings re er to local li eworlds that are somehowseparate rom the West. But their re ections should be read in relation tocontemporaneous attempts, between the 1920s and 1960s, to overcome conventional oppositions between speculative rationalism and positivist empiri-cism by developing concrete, embodied, lived, intuitive, or aesthetic ways oknowing through which to reconcile subject and object, thought and being,transcendence and worldliness. Teir work thus exists within a broad intellec-tual constellation including not only surrealist modernism or Bergsonian vital-

ism but ethnological culturalism, Christian personalism, and Marxist human-ism (as well as Jewish messianism and philosophical pragmatism). Tey alsocontributed to the critical engagement with instrumental reason, state capital-ism, the rei cation o everyday li e, the domestication o western Europeansocialism, and the limitations o Soviet Communism. Yet these thinkers arerarely included in general considerations o interwar philosophy or postwarsocial theory. Tis despite their novel attempts to link the search or a concretemetaphysics, poetic knowledge, and lived truth to a postnational political proj-

ect or colonial and human emancipation that built upon traditions o mu-tualist socialism, cooperative ederalism, and cosmopolitan internationalism.Or their attempts to re ormulate humanism and universalism on the basis oconcrete historical conditions and embodied experience.

Te point is not to reduce their thinking to continental or hexagonalparameters nor speciously to elevate or legitimate it by placing it alongside ca-nonical works. It is, rather, to use their work and acts to rethink, or unthink, thesupposedly European parameters o modern thought. Just as Csaire and Sen-ghor re used to concede that France was an ethnic category or continentalentity, they resisted the idea that they should approach modern philosophy as

oreigners. So rather than debate whether their writings were A rican-rooted orEuropean-in uenced, we should read them as postwar thinkers o the postwar period, one o whose primary aims was precisely to question the very categoriesA rica, France, and Europe through an immanent critique o late-imperialpolitics. Tey attempted in ways at once rooted and global to grapple withhuman and planetary problems at a moment o world-historical transition.

Understandable ears o totalizing explanation and Eurocentric evaluationhave led a generation o scholars to insist on the singularity o black, A rican,and non- Western orms o thought. But we now need to be less concerned


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with unmasking universalisms as covert European particularisms than withchallenging the assumption that the universal is European property. My aimis not to provincialize Europe but to deprovincialize A rica and the Antilles.Dipesh Chakrabartys landmark critique demonstrated that supposedly univer-sal categories were in act produced within culturally particular European so-cieties. Csaires and Senghors multiplex re ections on Negritude resonatein many ways with Chakrabartys argument about the existence o incommen-surable orms o being and thinking that are ofen ungraspable by the ratio-nalist protocols o modern historiography.

But their thinking also provides a perspective rom which to questionChakrabartys critique o general, abstract, and universal thought rom the stand-point o local, concrete, and particular li eworlds. It reveals how the provin-

cializing Europe argument depends partly on a set o territorial assumptionsabout li eworlds; how it tends to collapse people, place, and consciousness andto ethnicize orms o li e; how it equates the abstract and universal with Eu-rope and the concrete and lived with India or Bengal. Chakrabarty arguespersuasively that there is an intrinsic connection between orms o li e and

orms o thought but does not then inquire directly into the scales o li e- worlds in relation to which thinking is ofen orged. He seems reluctant torecognize that large social ormations and political elds, such as empires, are

also concrete places. Yet i there exists a determinate relationship between dwelling and think-

ing and i in certain cases we identi y an empire to be the relevant social orma-tion within which lives are lived and consciousness shaped, then that imperial

orm and scale, rather than a culture or ethnicity, must be relevant or under-standing a orm o thought. I webegin with empire as our unit o analysis, thecase or insisting on cultural singularity or epistemological incommensurabil-ity weakens.

An imperial optic, or example, may help us to appreciate how postwar Mart-inique or Senegal reallywere European places and integral parts o France.Or that putatively French or European orms o thought were elaboratedthrough the dialogic exchanges, antagonistic con rontations, and transconti-nental circulation that characterized li e and thought in mid-twentieth-centuryEuropean empires. It then ollows that the supposedly European categories opolitical modernity belong as much to the A rican and Antillean actors whocoproduced them as to their continental counterparts. Tese black thinkersalso produced important abstract and general propositions about li e, human-ity, history, and the world.


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My argument pushes against a recent tendency in comparative history andcolonial studies to insist upon multiple, alternative, or countermodernities,thus granting to Europe possession o a modernity which was always alreadytranslocal. What is the analytic and political cost o assigning to Europe suchcategories or experiences as sel -determination, emancipation, equality, justice,and reedom, let alone abstraction, humanity, or universality? Why con rmthe story that Europe has long told about itsel ? Modern, concrete univer-salizing processes (like capitalism) were not con ned to Europe. Nor wereconcepts o universality (or concepts that became universal) simply imposed by Europeans or imitated by non-Europeans. Tey were elaborated relation-ally and assumed a range o meanings that crystallized concretely through use.Moreover, A rican traditions o being and thinking entailed abstract ways o

conceptualizing humanity. All humanisms, afer all, are rooted in concrete wayso being, thinking, and worlding.Chakrabarty recognizes that the intellectual heritage o Enlightenment

thought is now global and that he writes rom within this inheritance. He con-cludes with an eloquent reminder that provincializing Europe cannot ever bea project o shunning European thought. For at the end o European imperial-ism, European thought is a gif to us all. We can talk o provincializing it onlyin an anticolonial spirit o gratitude. So clearly he is not himsel a provincial

or nativist thinker. Yet this conception o gratitude concedes too much at theoutsetto Europe as wealthy bene actor and to a liberal conception o pri- vate property. For i modernity was a global process its concepts are a com-mon legacy that already belong to all humanity; they are not Europes to give.Tey are the product o what Susan Buck-Morss has recently called universalhistory, the gif o the past, and communism o the idea.

In short, Csaires and Senghors postwar work invites us to deterritorializesocial thought and to decolonize intellectual history. Tis is not matter o valo-rizing non-European orms o knowledge but o questioning the presumptive boundaries o France or Europe themselves by recognizing the largerscales on which modern social thought was orged and appreciating that co-lonial societies produced sel -re exive thinkers concerned with large-scaleprocesses and uture prospects. Te point is not simply that Csaire and Sen-ghor were also interested in humanism, cosmopolitanism, and universalism.More signi cantly, they attempted to reclaim, rethink, and re unction thesecategories by overcoming the abstract registers in which they were convention-ally ormulated and attempted to realize them through intercontinental po-litical ormations.


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integration, Victor Schoelchers utopian vision o slave abolition in 1848, andoussaint Louvertures 1801 attempt to create a constitutional ederation with

imperial France; Senghors redemptive solidarity, Emmanuel Levinass and Jacques Derridas commitment to hospitality, and contemporary efforts to in-stitute cosmopolitan law and global democracy.

Csaire and Senghor were especially attentive to the complex relationship between politics and time. Tey explored separately how inherited legaciesmay animate current initiatives and how present acts may liberate the not yetrealized potential sedimented within rei ed objects. Alternatively they wereeach concerned with the proleptic character o politics, which sought to call

orth nonexistent worlds by acting as i an unimaginable uture were at hand.Teir sensitivity to the politics o time and the temporality o politics calls at-

tention to the marvelous but real relations that ofen implicate disparate times,places, peoples, and ideas in one another, relations that historians should at-tend to directly.

AlthoughFreedom ime ocuses primarily on the postwar opening, it alsoattempts to trace a constellation between that period and earlier moments oepochal transition when sel -determination and colonial emancipation becamepublic problems (i.e., the 1790s and 1840s) and likewise between the postwar opening and our contemporary conjuncture. My examination o Senghors

and Csaires programs or decolonization thus moves backward and orwardrom the postwar ulcrum, analyzing their sel -conscious relationship to pre-

decessors who also believed nonnational colonial emancipation might createconditions or real sel -determination. Tese included Schoelcher and Louver-ture, as well as Marx and Proudhon. But this study also looks orward romthe postwar period to a uture that Csaire and Senghor anticipated, one wenow inhabit and are still seeking to construct rom within what Jrgen Haber-mas has called the postnational constellation.

Structural trans ormations have unmade the postwar order that decolo-nization created and against which Csaire and Senghor sought alternativearrangements. Tese shifs make their works newly legible and politicallyresonant inso ar as they anticipated and addressed many o the conceptual andempirical predicaments that democracy in an age o globality must now con-

ront. Our political present is characterized by issues and proposals that cir-culated in the immediate postwar periodautonomy, sel -management, legalpluralism, cultural multiplicity, disaggregated sovereignty, and ederalism.Csaires and Senghors political initiatives thus speak to current movementsamong Francophone A ricans and Antilleans to reimagine and renegotiate their


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relationship to France, the European Union, and the international community.Tey also resonate with efforts today by scholars, activists, and internationallawyers to ashion new rameworks or postnational democracy, cosmopoli-tan law, and planetary politics.

Tis study, which, despite its length, I regard as an essay, is also meant to be an inquiry into the politics o time, paying special attention to how a givenhistorical epoch may not be identical with itsel and historical tenses may blurand interpenetrate. And it examines the untimely ways that people act as ithey exist or can address a historical epoch that is not their own, whether stra-tegically or unconsciously. Such connections can be grasped only abstractly;they cannot be indicated or documented in traditional empirical ashion. otack between past and present thus requires a certain movement between

empirical and abstract levels o analysis. Identi ying and ashioning historicalconstellations is one way o writing a history o the present that is relatedto but distinct rom the more amiliar strategy o producing genealogies.Free-dom ime thus works simultaneously to elaborate contexts, trace lines o de-scent, and construct constellations.

A crucial precedent and re erence point or this study is anthropologist DavidScotts important bookConscripts o Modernity , which power ully challengesthe nationalist orthodoxies o anticolonial thinking and demands that schol-

ars attend directly to historical temporality as an analytic and political prob-lem. Scott contends that morally and politically what ought to be at stake inhistorical inquiry is a critical appraisal o the present itsel , not the mere re-construction o the past. Regarding the unexamined persistence o certainanticolonial research questions that were once ormulated by C. L. R. James

or a now unavailable uture, he offers a warning or scholars today: the task be ore us is not one o merely nding better answers . . . to existing ques-tionsas though [they] were timeless ones but o re ecting on whether thequestions we have been asking the past to answer continue to be questions worth having answers to. Freedom ime accepts this urgent invitation to re-think historyincluding our stories about colonialism and our methods orapproaching the pastin relation to the demands o our political present.

In the ollowing chapters I develop a different understanding o the pro- vocative notion o utures past that Scott adapts rom the historian ReinhartKosellek. For Scott, revolutionary anticolonialisms dream o national sov-ereignty became a historically superseded and politically obsolete uture pastafer ailing to secure political reedom or colonized peoples and can no lon-ger meaning ully animate emancipatory projects in our radically trans ormed


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conditions. I am not primarily concerned with utures whose promise adedafer imper ect implementation nor with those that corresponded to a world,or to hopes, that no longer exist but instead with utures that were once imag-ined but never came to be, alternatives that might have been and whose un-realized emancipatory potential may now be recognized and reawakened asdurable and vital legacies.


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NOTES

1. Unthinking France, Rethinking Decolonization

1 I borrow the elicitous phrase rom Tomas Holts magisterialTe Problem ofFreedom. 2 Tis emphasis on what might have been differs rom the ocus on reconciliation,

rehabilitation, stabilization, and uni ying commemoration o the war in ony Judts Postwar . For criticism o Judts privileging memory over possibilities and notdirectly engaging decolonization, see Geoff Eley, Europe afer 1945, 195212.

3 Afer serving in the Resistance during the war, Lon-Gontran Damas, the thirdounder o the Negritude movement, represented Guyane in the French National

Assembly, where he headed a commission to investigate Frances violent repression

o protests in Cte dIvoire in 1950. Afer leaving electoral politics he conductedresearch or , traveled widely in A rica and the Americas, and taught atGeorgetown and Howard universities (Racine, Lon-Gontran Damas , 3154).

4 I distinguish between globe or global and world, worldness, or becoming worldwide, as connoted by the Frenchmondialit andmodialisation. See Le ebvre,Te Worldwide Experience, 27489, and Nancy, Urbi and Orbi, 3155.

5 C . Henri Le ebvres dialectic o the possible-impossible, or how alternative ormso li e may be recognized within actually existing arrangements: Introduction to Modernity , 68, 125, 348.

6 Gary Wilder,Te French Imperial Nation-State. 7 Te concrete cosmopolitanism o Paul Gilroy and Achille Mbembe and the radicalhumanism o Edward Said may be situated in a lineage including Senghor and Csaire.See Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia; Mbembe,Sortir de la grande nuit ; Said,Humanismand Democratic Criticism; and Alessandrini, Humanism in Question, 43150.

8 Tis has been the case or world-systems theorists, historians o British empire,and diplomatic historians. See Amin,Re-Reading the Postwar Period; Arrighi, Long

wentieth Century; Gallagher and Robinson, Imperialism o Free rade, 115;Louis, Imperialism at Bay; Louis and Robinson, Imperialism o Decolonization,

462511; Hopkins, Rethinking Decolonization, 21147; Connelly, A DiplomaticRevolution; and Lawrence and Logevall,Te First Vietnam War . 9 Marseille, Empire Colonial; Cooper, Decolonization and African Society; LeSueur,

Uncivil War , 3654; Shepard, Invention of Decolonization.


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276 1

10 See Lawrence and Logevall,Te First Vietnam War ; Amin,Re-Reading the Post-war Period , 1057; Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution; De Witte, Assassination of Lumumba; Luard,History of the United Nations , vols. 1 and 2. On US implicationin decolonization as a process o imperial restructuring, see Louis and Robinson,Empire Preservd; Arrighi, Long wentieth Century , 26999, Smith, American

Empire; Louis and Robinson, Imperialism o Decolonization, 462511; Kelly andKaplan,Represented Communities , 126. 11 See also Wilder, Response Essay. 12 Wilder, From Optic to opic, 72345. 13 See also Wilder, Eurafrique; Untimely Vision, 10140; Regarding the Imperial

Nation-State; and Unthinking French History, 12543. 14 On the concepts o imperial ormation and imperial social ormation, see Inden,

Imagining India , 2932; Sinha,Colonial Masculinity; Stoler, McGranahan, andPerdue, Imperial Formations.

15 See Wallerstein,Unthinking the Social Sciences. 16 LaCapra,History and Criticism , 7194. 17 Adorno, Notes on Ka a, 151. Adorno exempli es this orientation to criticism, when

he argues, the ul llment o [capitalisms] repeatedly broken exchange contract would converge with its abolition; exchange would disappear i truly equal things were exchanged; true progress would not be merely an Other in relation to exchange, but rather exchange that has been brought to itsel . Adorno, Progress, 159.

18 Senghors and Csaires postwar thinking differed in many respects. For example,Csaire was more interested in popular insurgency and less interested in religion

than Senghor. Csaire was more concerned with Antillean history and Senghor with A rican civilization. Csaire devoted more time to writing poetry and Senghor to writing about aesthetics. But I seek to challenge a commonplace attempt to recuper-ate Csaire as the radical thinker o the pair and dismiss Senghor as essentialist orcomprador. In act, during the postwar era their thinking intersected in ways thattranscended these intellectual stereotypes. We need to question the stakes o thistrans erential investment in embracing one and vili ying the other. For iterations othis tendency, see Arnold, Modernism and Negritude; Burton, Ke Moun Nou Ye?,532; Miller,French Atlantic riangle , 32530; and Jones,Racial Discourses. Tis split-

ting is largely shaped by a preoccupation with essentialism, which obscures a ullerengagement with each thinkers work in relation to their times and ours. See Scottsincisive critique o the metaphysics o antiessentialism within postcolonial theory:Scott,Conscripts of Modernity , 28, andRefashioning Futures , 315.

19 Scholarship is nally moving beyond ocusing on Negritude as a (progressive or con-servative) orm o identitarian cultural nationalism or A ricana philosophy that eitherhelped or hindered struggles or national independence. Recent work reconsiders Sen-ghor and Csaire as political thinkers in relation to broader elds o philosophy, criticaltheory, and aesthetics, and takes seriously their attempts to re gure universalism,

humanism, and cosmopolitanism. Not enough work, however, integrates their thoughtand acts in the domains o politics, criticism, theoretical re ection, and aesthetics. 20 In contrast, Diagne captures the dialogical and convergent quality o their engage-

ment with modernist thought by suggesting that Senghor could nd his language


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in Bergsons, which was as much a matter o resonance, citation, and in ection aso mechanical in uence: Diagne, Bergson in the Colonies, 126.

21 Vitalist strands o Senghors and Csaires thinking intermingled with many others,all o which were reworked within a multi aceted project that might be thought asa variant o romantic anticapitalism. See Lukcs, Te Old Culture, 2130; Lwy,

Marxism and Revolutionary Romanticism, 8395; Sayre and Lwy, Figureso Romantic Anti-Capitalism, 4292; on Marcuses lef Heideggerianism, see Wolin,Heideggers Children , 13572.

22 Teir postwar thinking may be read in relation to Le ebvres 1947 argument inCritique of Everyday Life.

23 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. 24 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe , 478, 10112. 25 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe , 20. 26 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe , 255.

27 Buck-Morss, Universal History, and Te Gif o the Past, 17385. 28 LaCapra,History and Criticism , 13942. 29 See Benjamin,Origin of German ragic Drama , 2756; Adorno, Actuality o Phi-

losophy, 2339, and Negative Dialectics; Buck-Morss,Origin of Negative Dialectics; Wolin,Walter Benjamin , 90106.

30 Habermas, Postnational Constellation. 31 In Adornos words: Instead o achieving something scienti cally, or creating

something artistically, the effort o the essay re ects a childlike reedom thatcatches re, without scruple, on what others have already done. . . . Its concepts are

neither deduced rom any rst principle nor do they come ull circle and arrive at anal principle (Te Essay as Form, 152). 32 Scott,Conscripts of Modernity , 41. 33 Scott,Conscripts of Modernity , 56, 209. 34 Kosellek,Futures Past .

2. Situating Csaire 1 Marx,Capital , 873930.

2 Marx, On the Jewish Question, 21141, and Concerning Feuerbach, 42123. 3 Marx,Capital , 93140. 4 See ch. 1, n. 1. 5 DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America , 219, 380. 6 DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America , 634, 187. 7 James,Te Black Jacobins. See also Dubois, Avengers of the New World. On ous-

saint acing a tragic predicament, see Scott,Conscripts of Modernity. 8 On the Haitian Revolutions revolutionary universalism, see Nesbitt, Te Idea o

1804, 638.

9 Dubois,Haiti , and Gary Wilder, elling Histories, 1125. For urther discussion othe counterplantation system, see Casimir, La culture opprim . 10 Forsdick, Situating Haiti, 1734; Nesbitt, roping oussaint, 1833. 11 Dubois, Avengers of the New World; Fick, French Revolution.

freedom time by gary wilder

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