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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Public Culture 134 fixation on cultural authenticity generates a politics of identitarian, communitar- ian, and nationalist ressentiment and revendication that may or may not include demands for formal independence. For these nationalists, departmentalization signals cultural assimilation and colonial alienation. Leaders of these movements have also expressed hostility toward their Antillean counterparts settled in met- ropolitan France as well as discriminatory xenophobia toward immigrants from other Caribbean countries.79 It might then be more appropriate to recognize Césaire’s legacy in multiple currents of pragmatic politics that are unfolding along paths the poet-politician originally traced. An organization, such as the Conseil Représentatif des Associa- tions Noires — a federation of black French civic associations founded after the 2005 banlieu uprising by Patrick Lozès, a French citizen whose family was origi- nally from Benin — extends Césaire’s interwar attempt to create bonds of solidar- ity among metropolitans of African descent. On the legislative front, Christiane Taubira, a parliamentary deputy representing Guiana, extends Césaire’s postwar struggle to compel the French state to honor its historical debts to the former slave colonies through full citizenship and social equality. And Serge Letchimy, the current leader of the PPM, extends Césaire’s project to create conditions for postcolonial freedom in Martinique through economic development, cultural autonomy, and democratic self-management.80 But it is also important to recognize another group of heirs to Césaire who are less visible and vocal than the others but who enact his legacy in fundamental ways. In contrast to the politicians with whom they are often allied, they approach Antillean politics with an experimental and future-oriented sensibility that rejects a priori formulas for postcolonial freedom and Antillean sociability. In contrast to the nationalist and independentist figures whom they criticize forcefully, they are cosmopolitans committed to a postracial republicanism and multicultural democ- racy within a reconfigured France. I am thinking here of the Guadeloupean nov- elist Daniel Maximin, the Martinican political scientist Justin Daniel, and the sociologist Michel Giraud, a metropolitan of Guadeloupean descent.81 79. Michel Giraud, “Le malheur d’être partis” (“The Misfortune of Having Left”), Esprit, no. 332 (2007): 49 – 61. 80. See Serge Letchimy, Discours sur l’Autonomie (Discourse on Autonomy) (Martinique: Ibis Rouge, 2002); Patrick Lozès, Nous, les Noirs de France (We, the Blacks of France) (Paris: Danger Public, 2007); and Site Officiel de Christiane Taubira, Députée de Guyane, www.christiane-taubira .org (accessed November 10, 2008). 81. See Daniel, “L’espace politique martiniquais”; Daniel, “Crise ou mutations des institutions”; Giraud, “De la négritude à la créolité”; Giraud, “Le malheur d’être partis”; Michel Giraud, “Crispa- tion identitaire et antisémitisme: Le cas d’Antilla” (“Identitarian Retrenchment and Anti-Semitism: