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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Untimely Vision 133 Césaire’s Legacy Insofar as the system that actually evolved in Martinique has displaced, and not only reproduced, some of the precepts of unitary republicanism, we might say that many of Césaire’s initial hopes for departmentalization were eventually real- ized. But we cannot grasp Césaire’s legacy simply by examining the evident fail- ures and qualified successes of departmentalization. Rather, we need to think of departmentalization in relation to the broader vision and spirit of engagement that animated Césaire’s successive political projects. Moreover, Césaire’s postwar interventions were not only pragmatic and instrumental. They were also visionary, anticipatory, and utopian. We must therefore engage his legacy not only in terms of the departmentalization that came to be but in terms of the postcolonial federa- tion that might have been or the decentralized republic that might one day emerge. Instead of criticizing Césaire’s positions as outmoded from the standpoint of a nationalist logic of decolonization, we can develop a critique of that logic itself as outmoded from the standpoint of Césaire’s insights and interventions. To inquire into Césaire’s legacy, then, is to recognize the residues and reso- nances of his concrete utopian commitment to confront colonial emancipation as an open-ended problem for which state sovereignty could not always serve as the presumptive solution. For Césaire, postcolonial freedom — understood in terms of self-management and economic liberty — would require political imagination and invention, not just the mechanical implementation of formal territorial indepen- dence. His spirit is thus present in projects that seek to convert formal liberty into substantivefreedombyrestructuringratherthanrejectingthejuridico-politicalpart- nership between the overseas departments and a multicultural French republic — of which Antilleans have always been an integral part and on which they have enduring legal, material, and moral claims. This political spirit will remain obscure as long as we reductively identify Césaire either as simply the nativist bard of Negritude, understood only as a cel- ebration of black subjectivity, or as the instrumental architect of departmentaliza- tion, understood only as a ruse for neocolonial dependency. This means that we cannot automatically associate Césaire’s legacy, as one might, with the range of Antillean nationalists and independentists who extend what they see as Negri- tude’s signal gesture, the rejection of cultural assimilation (even if they also criti- cize Césaire’s supposed focus on Africanity and his support for political assimi- lation). Concerned primarily with protecting and promoting a threatened Creole culture or national entity, their separatist orientation often leads these culturalists to criticize republicanism and universalism as foreign, hypocritical, or illusory. A