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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Untimely Vision 12 7 From the perspective of Césaire’s strategic utopianism, we can appreci- ate that “untimeliness” may have intentionally informed, rather than tragically undermined, his political strategy. He engaged history not to mourn lost pasts romantically but to awaken proleptic possibilities. The futurity of his projects for nonnational emancipation, addressed to a world to come, was inseparable from their historicity, from the long-term lineage that linked Louverture’s constitu- tion, Schoelcher’s abolitionism, Césaire’s departmentalization, and Senghor’s fed- eralism. The complex political temporalities of Césaire’s postwar interventions alert us to the fact that the period 1945 – 62 cannot simply contain the history of decolonization. I am not only observing that there were important precedents for decolonization. I am suggesting, in a deeper sense, that these earlier figures and eras persisted as vitally present elements of postwar politics, not simply as memo- ries but as living spirits, durable legacies, and effective forces, at least for the historical actors involved. Accordingly, historiography must grapple with the very real way in which the 1790s and 1840s constituted immediate historical contexts for the 1940s and 1950s.66 To study Césaire’s untimely political interventions in this way helps us approach the postwar period not in terms of the frozen Cold War order that came to be but as a world-historical opening in which a variety of nonnational political arrange- ments and experiments were imagined and enacted before being foreclosed. It also allows us to recognize how the not yet realized emancipatory possibilities contained in Césaire’s strategic utopian responses to the refractory problem of freedom remain available to us as vital legacies today. Given Césaire’s recent death, the question of his often-discredited political legacy has also become sud- denly timely. Postcolonial Martinique With Charles de Gaulle’s election as president in 1958, following the civil crisis attending the escalating Algerian war, the principles of unitary republicanism were reaffirmed. Hopes for a real postcolonial federation, beyond the nominal Com- munauté Française, quickly faded. Under the Fifth Republic, economic decline, neocolonial exploitation, social dependence, and cultural alienation — which also corresponded to a surge of labor migration to the metropole — fueled political 66. Colonial histories that implicitly construct constellations between distinct epochs and address processes of temporal refraction include Césaire’s and Glissant’s works on Toussaint (cited above); James, Black Jacobins; as well as Scott, Conscripts of Modernity; and Richard Price, The Convict and the Colonel: A Story of Colonialism and Resistance in the Caribbean (Boston: Beacon, 1998).