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Untimely Vision 12 3 Césaire’s writing enacts a range of sometimes ambivalent identifications. His engagement with Haitian history clearly informed his programmatic writings and political interventions about “true” decolonization as a revolutionary overcoming of colonialism that included indispensable political, socioeconomic, cultural, and psychic dimensions.58 The legacy of the revolution in Saint-Domingue — violent, popular, and separatist — also informed Césaire’s strategic politics. He conjured it as a portentous precedent for the Antillean revolution that, he warned the National Assembly, would surely come if France continued to treat the new departments as colonial possessions. An equivalent revolutionary catastrophe was thus figured as both imminent and avoidable.59 Yet the Haitian Revolution, as mythic rupture, also functioned for Césaire as a projective object through which he acted out a frustrated desire for the anticolonial revolution that might never come in postwar Martinique, despite the devolution of departmentalization into neocolonialism. Césaire was more resolute about embracing Louverture’s legacy as a clairvoy- ant political strategist who confronted the problem of freedom in counterintui- tive and often unpopular ways. Césaire’s project also required patience, negotia- tion, and self-sacrifice.60 As they had for the Precursor, historical transformations compelled Césaire at crucial junctures to rethink his strategy, abandon earlier positions, and formulate new programs of action. Both figures dissociated self- determination from national independence and envisioned political autonomy within a postcolonial federation that would sublate the existing nation-state. Each recognized that imperialism itself had created the conditions for overcoming colonial subjection through federalism. Each proposed seemingly modest adjust- ments to existing arrangements that could in turn transcend them even as such revolutionary changes would largely affirm an already emergent set of relations. 58. See Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism) (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2000); Césaire, “Culture et colonisation” (“Culture and Colonisation”), Présence afri caine, nos. 8 – 10 (1956): 190 – 205; Césaire, introduction to Guérin, Les Antilles décolonisées; Césaire, “L’homme de culture et ses responsabilités” (“The Man of Culture and His Responsibilities”), Présence africaine, nos. 24 – 25(1959):116 – 22;and Césaire, “Crise dans les départementsd’outre-mer ou crise de la départementalisation?” (“Crisis in the Overseas Departments or a Departmentalization Crisis?”), Présence africaine, no. 36 (1961): 109 – 11. 59. Dubois’s work demonstrates that such anxious and prophetic warnings of Antillean revolu- tions that would come unless slavery were abolished extend back to prerevolutionary Saint-Domingue in the writings of Louis Sebastien Mercier and the abbé Raynal. See Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 57 – 59. Césaire was also evoking a tradition of successive uprisings, unrest, and strikes in Martinique extending from the 1820s to the 1960s. 60. Césaire made similar points about the long-term commitments, lifelong struggles, and repeated setbacks of Grégoire and Schoelcher (Césaire, “Discours d’inauguration de la place de l’abbé Grégoire”; JORF, December 17, 1982).