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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
101 Untimely Vision: Aimé Césaire, Decolonization, Utopia Gary Wilder I have no ambitions about finding a solution. I do not know where we are going, but I know that we must charge ahead. The black man must be liberated, but he must also be liberated from the liberator. — Aimé Césaire, Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai I inhabit a three-hundred-year war. — Aimé Césaire, “Lagoonal Calendar” Freedom and History In his lucid mediation on “the tragedy of colonial Enlighten- ment,” David Scott asks why scholars continue to produce Romantic narratives of anticolonial revolution when the politicohistorical framework within which such histories were once relevant has changed decisively. In an era when the Bandung project has collapsed, when the future of national sovereignty that it envisioned has Public Culture 21:1 doi 10.1215/08992363-2008-023 Copyright 2009 by Duke University Press im ag i n i n g t h e h isto ri c a l proj ec t This essay is drawn from my current book project tentatively titled “Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, Utopia.” For opportunities to present earlier versions of the essay at Harvard Uni- versity, Duke University, Northwestern University, the University of Missouri, and the New School, I thank my hosts Abiola Irele, Laurent Dubois, Tessie Liu, Mamadou Badiane, and Ann Laura Stoler. I am also grateful for comments on earlier drafts from Claudio Lomnitz, Paul Saint-Amour, the edito- rial board of Public Culture, and especially Laurent Dubois. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.