Freedom Time reconsiders decolonization from the perspectives of Aime Cesaire (Martinique) and Leopold Sedar Senghor (Senegal) who, beginning in 1945, promoted self-determination without state sovereignty. As politicians, public intellectuals, and poets they struggled to transform imperial France into a democratic federation, with former colonies as autonomous members of a transcontinental polity. In so doing, they revitalized past but unrealized political projects and anticipated impossible futures by acting as if they had already arrived. Refusing to reduce colonial emancipation to national independence, they regarded decolonization as an opportunity to remake the world, reconcile peoples, and realize humanity's potential. Emphasizing the link between politics and aesthetics, Gary Wilder reads Cesaire and Senghor as pragmatic utopians, situated humanists, and concrete cosmopolitans whose postwar insights can illuminate current debates about self-management, postnational politics, and planetary solidarity. Freedom Time invites scholars to decolonize intellectual history and globalize critical theory, to analyze the temporal dimensions of political life, and to question the territorialist assumptions of contemporary historiography.
Freedom Time reconsiders decolonization from the perspectives of Aime Cesaire (Martinique) and Leopold Sedar Senghor (Senegal) who, beginning in 1945, promoted self-determination without state sovereignty. As politicians, public intellectuals, and poets they struggled to transform imperial France into a democratic federation, with former colonies as autonomous members of a transcontinental polity. In so doing, they revitalized past but unrealized political projects and anticipated impossible futures by acting as if they had already arrived. Refusing to reduce colonial emancipation to national independence, they regarded decolonization as an opportunity to remake the world, reconcile peoples, and realize humanity's potential. Emphasizing the link between politics and aesthetics, Gary Wilder reads Cesaire and Senghor as pragmatic utopians, situated humanists, and concrete cosmopolitans whose postwar insights can illuminate current debates about self-management, postnational politics, and planetary solidarity. Freedom Time invites scholars to decolonize intellectual history and globalize critical theory, to analyze the temporal dimensions of political life, and to question the territorialist assumptions of contemporary historiography.
Index 373
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
1. Unthinking France, Rethinking Decolonization 1
2. Situating Césaire: Antillean Awakening and Global Redemption
17
3. Situating Senghor: African Hospitality and Human Solidarity
49
4. Freedom, Time, Territory 74
5. Departmentalization and the Spirit of Schoelcher 106
6. Federalism and the Future of France 133
7. Antillean Autonomy and the Legacy of Louverture 167
8. African Socialism and the Fate of the World 206
9. Decolonization and Postnational Democracy 241
Chronology 261
Notes 275
Works Cited 333
Gary Wilder is Associate Professor of Anthropology at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars.
"Freedom Time is an important book. It is also exceptionally
scholarly and extremely readable. Such qualities rarely inhere in a
single text. And they are rarely bundled into an analysis so
passionate and timely that excavates past attempts at human
emancipation in order to reveal new pathways into
modernization."
*Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology*
"Rich, dense, and meticulously researched, Gary Wilder’s book
offers nuanced critical reflections on the alternative landscapes
of freedom proposed by Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor."
*French Studies*
"There is an important message here ... for a broad audience, and I
sincerely hope that it reaches beyond French Studies, postcolonial,
or colonial historical studies. Wilder observes that Césaire, Sédar
and their contemporaries in black Caribbean and African thought
‘are rarely included in general considerations of interwar
philosophy or postwar social theory’ (9). What Freedom Time does
most convincingly is to demonstrate that the social theory studied
in European universities is weaker for this omission and that
serious engagement with these thinkers is long overdue."
*Ethnic and Racial Studies*
"[A] thoughtful and challenging work on the often maligned
Negritude thinkers, poets, and politicians Aimé Césaire and Léopold
Senghor."
*Callaloo*
"[A] tremendous achievement in scope and originality. Readers who
wish to think about the nation-state from a deeply historical and
theoretically sophisticated perspective will be richly
rewarded."
*Africa Today*
"Freedom Time is an engaging book that combines cultural
anthropology, political theory and postcolonial theory and offers
the reader a detailed intellectual history of Leopold Senghor and
Aimé Césaire between 1945 and 1960."
*European Review of History*
"Gary Wilder’s Freedom Time constitutes an exciting and
significant contribution to the field of nation and nationalism
study in that he challenges the claim that decolonisation and
self-determination can, and should, only lead to one form of state
sovereignty: the nation-state."
*Nations and Nationalism*
"Wilder provides us with a provocative retelling of the
intellectual and political vision of two luminaries of the 20th
century, and he does a great service by recasting our attention to
these two authors to provoke reflection on the condition of
nationhood and sovereignty in the 21st century. The text is always
engaging and at times possesses a lyricism that echoes the poetics
of Césaire and Senghor.... This book is a welcome addition,
providing a substantial contribution to the field of francophone
intellectual history."
*Anthropological Quarterly*
"Freedom Time is a dynamic treatise deftly upholding the Fanonian
and Wynterian imperatives to navigate ongoing processes of
decolonization and becoming Human betwixt and between the allure of
emancipations masking as freedom."
*Theory & Event*
"Freedom Time is an impressive, inspiring, necessary work. . .
. Wilder's lucid, sensitively textured and impressively
well-researched book allows us to rethink the meaning of
decolonisation and the conceptual nexus surrounding it."
*Cultural Studies Review*
"Wilder’s reading of Senghor and Césaire is subtle and engaging,
and challenges the idea that they were cynical – or naive."
*London Review of Books*
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
