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Untimely Vision 115 33. Césaire, “Pour la transformation,” 482. 34. Quoted in Moutoussamy, Aimé Césaire, 54. 35. His shift was also informed by the worsening war in Algeria, which he challenged in the assembly. 36. Césaire, “Pour la transformation,” 478. 37. Césaire, “Pour la transformation,” 478. He also develops a related but different account of the dialectical overcoming of departmentalization in his introduction to Daniel Guérin, Les Antilles décolonisées (The Decolonized Antilles) (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956), 7 – 15. 38. Césaire, “Pour la transformation,” 478. never elevate Antilleans into full French citizens. Genuine equality for Martin- ique, according to Césaire, would have required that all labor and social welfare protections be immediately extended to its people whose standard of living would have to be raised to a metropolitan level. And genuine socioeconomic indepen- dence would have required a commitment to industrialization, free participation in the global market, and permission to erect customs protections.33 Such measures, however, were unacceptable to the metropolitan government: the first set would have cost too much, while the second would have undermined Martinique’s status as a neocolonial territory. For years Césaire had argued that departmentalization had to be implemented to alleviate persistent poverty and social misery in Mar- tinique. By this time, however, he suggested that departmentalization itself was the source of Martinique’s stagnation and unemployment. Rather than criticize the state for failing to implement the 1946 law, his critique identified how the law, by creating “départements d’exception,” authorized an institutional framework directly responsible for enduring inequality, exploitation, and dependence.34 Césaire recognized that France would not allow Antillean colonialism to be overcome through integration.35 Departmentalization, which had begun as a his- toric opening for substantive emancipation, had become an obstacle to it. In a dialectical account of this process, Césaire argued that until 1945 economic and social isolation had provided Martinique with a large measure of autonomy. But “this status became a fetter on the development of Martinique and an obstacle to our progress. Thus was born the idea of departmentalization.”36 He explained, “If one day the regime created by departmentalization, thanks to the very progress due to departmentalization, in turn appears as an obstacle, nothing, that is to say, no fetishism, will prevent it from being called into question [remis en cause] to make room for a regime that will be not only the negation of the two previ- ous regimes but their transcended and enriched form.”37 Clearly, ten years after the 1946 law, departmentalization had indeed become an obstacle to progress. Césaire challenged it directly as an overly centralized and undemocratic system directed by outsiders that perpetuated structural inequality for Antilleans.38