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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Public Culture 116 Departmentalization as instituted had obstructed Césaire’s 1946 emancipa- tory vision at the very moment that decolonization across the imperial periphery was gathering momentum. In 1956 he denounced France’s untimely attempt “to decolonize Africa and recolonize the Antilles” through departmentalization and questioned Martinique’s dubious legal status.39 During his reelection campaign Césaire distributed a public statement that declared that relief from the territory’s desperate economic situation would not come from continental France. It called on the people of Martinique to “assume a greater role in the management of their own affairs. . . . What we propose is a policy democratic in its inspiration, social in its goals, and Martinican in its means.”40 Soon thereafter Césaire left the French Communist Party. In his legendary letter of resignation to Maurice Thorez, he called for a “Copernican Revolution” whereby Martinicans would take greater responsibility for an anticolonial struggle that would henceforth be self-directed and grounded in black peoples’ specific conditions, problems, and cultures.41 He concluded by linking this call for political autonomy in the Antilles to one for greater solidarity with a wider range of international Pan-African struggles. In 1958 Césaire cofounded the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais (PPM) to serve as the institutional vehicle for “cooperative federalism,” the autonomous political project that he hoped would transcend departmentalization. Through the PPM Césaire aligned himself with a movement led by African colonial legislators to recon- stitute the French nation-state as a federal republic. He maintained that “the federal idea” could “dialectically overcome” the “antinomy” of assimilation (by which he meant departmentalization) and autonomy (by which he meant full independence). Césaire argued that by forcing the impoverished territory to be financially self- sufficient, total autonomy would “provoke the dismantling of our social laws and . . . [an] attack on our workers’ standard of living,” creating only an “autonomy of wretchedness [autonomie de la misère].” But the alternative to this “separatism that would kill us” was total assimilation, which he now regarded as cultural suicide. Invoking Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s utopian socialist conception of federation as well as Italy’s federal constitution, Césaire proposed ongoing affiliation with France within a postcolonial federalist framework as the best way to ensure economic via- bility, cultural autonomy, and political self-management for Martinique.42 39. Quoted in Moutoussamy, Aimé Césaire, 74. 40. Quoted in Moutoussamy, Aimé Césaire, 62. 41. Césaire, Lettre à Maurice Thorez (Letter to Maurice Thorez) (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956), 13. 42. Césaire, “Pour la transformation,” 479 – 92. For the federalist program advocated by African colonial legislators, see Senghor’s parliamentary interventions collected in Léopold Sédar Senghor,