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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Public Culture 136 licanism, expressing its deepest values and prefiguring its future forms.82 Rather than try to protect an idealized Creole culture overseas, they are alert to the radi- cal possibilities that may emerge through the créolisation of France itself. They recognize that democracy and development in the DOM will continue to require intercultural dialogue, reciprocity, and métissage, as well as political negotiation and partnership. In short, these writers direct our attention to an underlying link between post- colonial freedom and postnational democracy.83 They are open to the political potential that may inhere in the imperfect kinds of experiments in legal pluralism, administrative decentralization, and shared sovereignty that historical conditions have compelled French Antilleans to pursue. Of course, they criticize the para- doxes, contradictions, and impasses that circumscribe Antillean public life. And they challenge the persistence of French racism and structural inequality in the Antilles. But they also embrace the ways in which the DOMs may function as an improvisational laboratory, where pluralist, autonomist, federalist, and confeder- alist arrangements with the French republic, the Caribbean region, and the Euro- pean Union can be worked out as the only viable path toward a social democratic future in an era of neoliberal globalization and postcolonial failure. Just as Césaire was not naive about the imperial underpinnings of the French Union, we should not turn a blind eye to the limitations of departmentalization. But just as Césaire’s pragmatic interventions were guided by strategic utopian insights into what the French Union could possibly become, we must now try to imagine how actually existing departmentalization may point beyond itself toward an alternative form of federal democracy whose prospective realization Césaire had already envisioned. Viewed from the standpoint of the nationalist logic of decolonization, the French Antilles are typically seen as a neocolonial anachronism. But from our postnational vantage point, by way of an immanent critique, they also appear to anticipate a world to come. Here too, as in Scott’s 82. Michel Giraud and Patrick Weil, “À la pointe avancée de la République” (“At the Cutting Edge of the Republic”), Esprit, no. 332 (2007): 48; Maximin, Pocrain, and Taubira, “Quelle mémoire de l’esclavage?” 68 – 69. 83. On postnational democracy, see Jürgen Habermas, “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy,” in The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, ed. and trans. Max Pensky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 58 – 112; Habermas, “Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years’ Hindsight,” in Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cos- mopolitan Ideal, ed. James Bohman and Mattias Lutz-Bachmann (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 113 – 53; and Habermas, “Does the Constitutionalization of International Law Still Have a Chance?” in The Divided West, ed. and trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 115 – 93.