Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World by Gary Wilder (review)

“The act that we will perform is as beautiful as ‘a rose that the Eiffel Tower, at last, can see blooming.’ It is as ‘great as our need for fresh air.’ It is as ‘strong as a piercing cry in a long, long night.’” Talking in front of the French National Assembly on 29 January 2013, Christiane Taubira borrowed a few lines from a poem written 50 years before by Léon-Gontran Damas, one of the co-founders of the Negritude movement. A former anticolonial activist in French Guyana turned France’s first Black Minister of Justice, Taubira was giving a speech in defence of her contested project to legalize same-sex marriage in France. Gary Wilder’s Freedom Time only implicitly alludes to recent French tensions around gender and sexuality (257) and mentions Damas (51) or Taubira (249) just in passing. Yet this book of parallels — part intellectual history of decolonization, part critical theory of postnational emancipatory politics — contributes precious insights to reconcile Taubira’s complex political trajectory and to understand her strategic framing of same-sex marriage in terms of equality and difference, as well as her passionate embrace of the Negritude poets. More broadly, Wilder’s new book aims to foster present and future attempts at “unthinking France” and “remaking the world” (6).

Freedom Time focuses on Damas’s main associates in the Negritude movement, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, both elected members of the French National Assembly in the era immediately following World War II; the former was also mayor of Fort-de-France from 1945 to 2001, the latter a major political player in Senegal and later its first President from 1960 to 1981. Chapters alternate between these two figures’ joint trajectories. Wilder approaches postwar efforts to rework France’s empire by zooming in on their views on departmentalization, federalism, and decolonization. Taking seriously Césaire and Senghor’s rhetoric in both their literary and militant works, Wilder defends their commitments to self-determination and democracy. He argues that Césaire and Senghor’s postwar political projects and visions of the future outlined a form of decolonization that did not consider the creation of independent nation-states a satisfactory response to the problem of emancipation and freedom. Asserting such, Freedom Time challenges hierarchies of radicalism that value Fanonian calls for violent and definitive ruptures with colonial empires and that patronize as accommodative the politics of those who instead projected democratic futures unto transformed and decolonized imperial frameworks.

Calls to historians of decolonization not to view the emergence of independent nation-states as the natural outcome of colonial empires — and instead to seriously look at the federations and other alternatives to empires that historical actors considered after World War II — are reminiscent of the work of Frederick Cooper on decolonization in French West Africa, most notably Citizenship between Imperialism and Nation-State: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton, 2015). Similarly, Wilder’s incorporation of Reinhart Kosseleck ’s attention to historical temporalities is part of a larger turn toward the study of imagined futures in imperial histories.

Yet in contrast to this recent scholarship, Wilder’s Freedom Time shows little interest in colonial archival trails. As in his previous monograph, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars (Chicago, 2005) — already in part a study of Negritude, but focused on the movement’s involvement with the impossibilities rather than the potentialities of empire (xiii) — Wilder challenges disciplinary expectations regarding the balance between abstraction, theory, and empiricism in historical writing. The attempt is most stimulating when, elevating Césaire and Senghor as “epochal thinkers” whose legacy demands to be “deprovincialized” (10), Wilder puts them in dialogue with thinkers and authors rarely included in the usual intellectual mapping of the Negritude movement. Freedom Time’s enlarged cast of characters (from Hannah Arendt to Jacques Derrida, W.E.B...