Unthinking France, Rethinking Decolonization

An emancipated society ... would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.—THEODOR ADORNO

This book is about "the problem of freedom" after the end of empire. The title refers not only to the postwar moment as a time for colonial freedom but to the distinct types of time and peculiar political tenses required or enabled by decolonization. Decolonization raised fundamental questions for subject peoples about the frameworks within which self-determination could be meaningfully pursued in relation to a given set of historical conditions. These were entwined with overarching temporal questions about the relationship between existing arrangements, possible futures, and historical legacies. The year 1945 was a world-historical opening; the contours of the postwar order were not yet fixed, and a range of solutions to the problem of colonial emancipation were imagined and pursued. At the same time, the converging pressures of anticolonial nationalism, European neocolonialism, American globalism, and UN internationalism made it appear to be a foregone conclusion that the postwar world would be organized around territorial national states.

Freedom Time tells this story of opening and foreclosure through unrealized attempts by French African and Antillean legislators and intellectuals during the Fourth and Fifth Republics to invent forms of decolonization that would secure self-determination without the need for state sovereignty. Central to this account are Aimé Césaire from Martinique and Léopold Sédar Senghor from Senegal who, between 1945 and 1960, served as public intellectuals, party leaders, and deputies in the French National Assembly. Their projects proceeded from a belief that late imperialism had created conditions for new types of transcontinental political association. They hoped to overcome colonialism without falling into the trap of national autarchy. Their constitutional initiatives were based on immanent critiques of colonialism and republicanism, identifying elements within each that pointed beyond their existing forms. They not only criticized colonialism from the standpoint of constitutional democracy and self-government; they also criticized unitary republicanism from the standpoint of decentralized, interdependent, plural, and transnational features of imperialism itself.

In different ways Césaire and Senghor hoped to fashion a legal and political framework that would recognize the history of interdependence between metropolitan and overseas peoples and protect the latter's economic and political claims on a metropolitan society their resources and labor had helped to create. Rather than allow France and its former colonies to be reified as independent entities in an external relationship to each other, the task was to institutionalize a long-standing internal relationship that would persist even after a legal separation. They were not simply demanding that overseas peoples be fully integrated within the existing national state but proposing a type of integration that would reconstitute France itself, by quietly exploding the existing national state from within. Legal pluralism, disaggregated sovereignty, and territorial disjuncture would be constitutionally grounded. The presumptive unity of culture, nationality, and citizenship would be ruptured.

Given these colonies' entwined relationship with metropolitan society, decolonization would have to transform all of France, continental and overseas, into a different kind of political formation—specifically, a decentralized democratic federation that would include former colonies as freely associated member states. This would guarantee colonial emancipation and model an alternative global order that would promote civilizational reconciliation and human self-realization. At stake, for them, was the very future of the world.

Refusing to accept the doxa that self-determination required state sovereignty, their interventions proceeded from the belief that colonial peoples cannot presume to know a priori which political arrangements would best allow them to pursue substantive freedom. Yet this pragmatic orientation was inseparable from a utopian commitment to political imagination and anticipatory politics through which they hoped to transcend the very idea of France, remake the world, and inaugurate a new epoch of human history. Their projects were at once strategic and principled, gradualist and revolutionary, realist and visionary, timely and untimely. They pursued the seemingly impossible through small deliberate acts. As if alternative futures were already at hand, they explored the fine line between actual and imagined, seeking to invent sociopolitical forms that did not yet exist for a world that had not yet arrived, although many of the necessary conditions and institutions were already present. This proleptic orientation to political futurity was joined to a parallel concern with historicity. They proclaimed themselves heirs to the legacies of unrealized and seemingly outmoded emancipatory projects.

This book may be read in at least two ways. On one level, it is an intellectual history of Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor between 1945 and 1960. As such, it extends the account provided in my last book of the genesis of the Negritude project in the 1930s in relation to a new form of colonial governance in French West Africa, the political rationality of postliberal republicanism, and the development of a transnational black public sphere in imperial Paris. Freedom Time follows that story into the postwar period, when these student-poets became poet-politicians participating directly in reshaping the contours of Fourth and Fifth Republic France and pursuing innovative projects for self-determination. On another level, it attempts to think through their work about the processes and problems that defined their world and continue to haunt ours. Their writings on African and Antillean decolonization may also be read as reflections on the very prospect of democratic self-management, social justice, and human emancipation; on the relationship between freedom and time; and on the links between politics and aesthetics. They attempted to transcend conventional oppositions between realism and utopianism, materialism and idealism, objectivity and subjectivity, positivism and rationalism, singularity and universality, culture and humanity. The resulting conceptions of poetic knowledge, concrete humanism, rooted universalism, and situated cosmopolitanism now appear remarkably contemporary. Their insights, long treated as outmoded, do not only speak to people...