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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Public Culture 124 Emancipation and the (Nationalist) Logic of Decolonization After World War II a new global context and institutional framework, including the one created by the Fourth Republic under the name of the French Union for frankly imperial aims, again made postcolonial federation a real historical pos- sibility. Yet in an era of Gaullist nationalism and revolutionary anticolonialism, a project that proposed transcending the republican nation-state from within and abolishing colonialism without declaring national independence also appeared implausibly anachronistic. Such a program could be realized only in a world order that was already postimperial, postnational, and postracial. But by acting as if such a future was within reach and might arrive at any moment, Césaire’s federal- ism may also be understood as an enacted and concrete utopia. By pursuing an impossible vision systematically, he revealed what might actually be possible in the present. And by seizing the present possible, he glimpsed what appeared to be an impossible future. Césaire wagered on an elevated French republic through an untimely intervention that looked simultaneously backward, to emancipate futures past, and forward, to anticipate futures to come. Here was a dialectic of the possible and the impossible as well as the timely and the untimely wherein each disclosed, inhered within, and helped realize the other. In short, Césaire elaborated a cosmopolitan vision that called for and called forth a political form that did not yet exist. My argument, in other words, should not be read as a revisionist claim that the French Union was anything other than a form of imperial rule or that the overseas departments would fare better by remaining French colonies. My point is that Césaire was not simply demanding that overseas peoples be fully integrated into the existing republic. He was pro- posing a type of integration that would transform the republic definitively. France itself would be reconstituted as a postcolonial and social democratic federation whose multinational and multicultural character would be politically formalized. Legal pluralism, disaggregated sovereignty, and territorial disjuncture would be institutionalized. The presumptive unity of culture, nationality, and citizenship would be ruptured. Césaire identified in France’s national history revolutionary traditions of populism, socialism, and self-management that could be linked to the legacies and prophecies of Schoelcher and Louverture. The project was not sim- ply to apply an existing republicanism to new groups of peoples but to transform republicanism, in relation to emergent historical conditions, so that its underlying potentiality for human emancipation might be more fully realized. Césaire hoped thereby to fashion an elevated postnational republic that would necessarily trans-