Please activate JavaScript!
Please install Adobe Flash Player, click here for download
ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Public Culture 126 invent a form in which the greatest degree of substantive freedom for Antilleans could be secured in relation to the existing and emergent orders, even as they also anticipated a seemingly impossible future to come. Yet critics often find it dif- ficult to recognize that Césaire’s untimely commitment to future affiliation with a transformed France was not simply a political failure or a compromise but a principled position animated by a radical political strategy that placed present and future, existent and imagined, into a dynamic relationship.64 The evidence suggests that Césaire’s postwar interventions flowed from a prag- matic insight that territorial sovereignty would not be the most effective way for small countries with limited resources to secure substantive liberty in the emer- gent Cold War order. He recognized that threats from global capitalism, American hegemony, and a new European Union (EU) would be at least as great as those that he expected from ongoing affiliation with imperial France. And he foresaw that decolonization would be a process of rending whereby overseas French nation- als would be stripped of a range of hard-won political rights and social entitle- ments.65 Also animating his project was a principled belief that a federal republic might be the most progressive framework through which to pursue postcolonial democracy and development. Equally present was a utopian hope that such con- stitutional initiatives might help to radically transform sociopolitical relations on national, imperial, and international scales. We may thus identify in Césaire’s postwar political commitments and strategies an internal connection among the pragmatic, the ethical, and the utopian in which each modality inhered within and nourished the others. Césaire’s utopianism was sustained by an underlying relationship among immanent critique, concrete acts, and political imagination. He pursued apparently impossible objectives in a practical and systematic fashion. His pragmatic interventions were animated by critical foresight and revolutionary anticipation, yet with full knowledge that such historically possible projects might be politically impossible. At the same time, he pursued radical transformations based on conditions and institutions that actually existed. 64. For empathetic and insightful interpretations of Césaire’s postwar projects that resonate with my own, see Michel Giraud, “De la négritude à la créolité: Une évolution paradoxale à l’ère départ- mentale” (“From Negritude to Creoleness: A Paradoxical Evolution during the Departmentalization Period”), in Constant and Daniel, 1946 – 1996, 373 – 401; William, “Aimé Césaire”; and Nick Nes- bitt, “Departmentalization and the Logic of Decolonization,” L’esprit créateur 47 (2007): 32 – 43. 65. Cf. Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Todd Shepard, The Inven- tion of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni- versity Press, 2006).