The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (review)

From the outset Wilder asks what are we to make of the fact that republican France was never not an imperial nation-state? His response, a work of assured synthesis and clear argument, marks its difference from other histories that attempt to idealize the Republic and frame colonial violations of republican values as aberrations. Wilder questions whether one can understand the national republic as distinct from the imperial nation and argues that both terms be read as entwined products of colonial modernity. Wilder argues that colonial modernity incorporates both a normative universality and a particularist reality and so a critique of either from the standpoint of the other would be to neglect the antinomies they sponsored in the interwar period of French history. Wilder fleshes out the relationship between empire and republic and between universality and particularity, by focusing on two movements that responded to the interwar crises of legitimacy and colonial citizenship: the colonial humanism of republican administrators and the cultural nationalism of the Negritude movement. In the first instance, he examines the discourse of colonial administrators who sought to bring a benign version of administration to the colonies. Drawing on archival material and social theory, Wilder examines the relationship between colonial administration and colonial ethnography and analyses the policies adopted by republican reformers in colonial French West Africa (AOF), who sought to marry the insights of ethnography with the perceived benefits of science and paternalist rule. Wilder points to the paradoxes that emerged, not so as to 'uncover a contradiction either between colonial humanism's universalist claim to respect Africans as equal individuals and its "real" racializing practices, or between its particularist claim to respect African society as a cultural equal and its "real" assimilating practices' but to demonstrate how cultural humanism 'enabled a (cultural) racism that was simultaneously universalizing and particularizing' (p.143). At the same time, these practices and discourses also enabled spaces of contestation both within the colonies and within metropolitan France. One such space was the black public sphere inhabited by Antillean and African elites living in Paris and out of which emerged a younger generation of student-poets who formed the Negritude movement. Wilder argues that the colonial reformist movement and the Negritude movement formed a common political field within which easy distinctions need to be suspended. Whilst this field can be understood within the framework of the imperial nation-state, conversely it explains the contradictions of that state. Drawing on Foucault's notion of discursive genealogies, Wilder historicizes the emergence of the Negritude movement and reclaims it from the flattening critiques and shorthand of its critics and champions. Having established both argument and context, Wilder reads the works of Senghor, Damas and Césaire and tracks attempts by these Negritude writers to 'recuperate the emancipatory possibilities contained in both universalism and particularism', and to 'rethink cultural politics for a republican empire' (p. 204). Wilder offers a critique that demonstrates the transformation of colonial humanism into a 'potentially disruptive cultural nationalism' (p. 253). Negritude writers, for example, used both reason and poetry to critique forms of rationality that upheld a form of (colonial) reason despite the ways in which the emergence of Negritude was inscribed, but not circumscribed, within colonial humanism. Wilder's excellent work, along with recent, complementary publications by French historians (such as Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, Françoise Vergès and Sandrine Lemaire), should feature on essential reading lists for some time to come.