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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Untimely Vision 137 84. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 2:203 – 10; Arendt, “Preface: The Gap between Past and Future,” and “What Is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 2006), 3 – 15, 142 – 69. account of James’s Louverture, the Caribbean functions as an exemplary scene of colonial modernity. And as in revolutionary Saint-Domingue, black French actors in the overseas departments must still grapple with a series of refractory dilem- mas and unsatisfying alternatives. But just because there may be no way out does not mean that there is no way forward. For many African and Caribbean peoples, revolutionary nationalism and state sovereignty have proved inadequate media for postcolonial freedom. But Antil- lean attempts to overcome colonialism nonnationally through experiments in plu- ral democracy may reveal how political emancipation might still be meaningfully pursued. Césaire’s Caribbean, then, may serve not only as a symptom of trag- edy but as a democratic prophecy. His strategic utopian project for nonnational colonial emancipation — the legacy that he inherited and willed — should surely count as a fecund source for an effective history of our present through which to glimpse a possible future. That the Caribbean continues to play the role of political avatar is reinforced by the fact that federalist and pluralist attempts to imagine and enact postnational democracy and cosmopolitan law are now pursued by political theorists, interna- tional lawyers, and progressive activists around the world. Innovative responses to the challenges posed by immigrants rights, French Islam, and European Union membership seek in various ways to move beyond unitary republicanism by disaggregating sovereignty and dissociating citizenship from nationality. Such experiments and proposals envision political forms located between an outmoded national state and an implausible global state through which to confront the pro- verbial democracy deficit of globalization and through which to overcome the persistent antinomy between national rights and human rights. The hope is to find a constitutional framework that may reconcile republican universality and cultural multiplicity. Such a political form might also link the kind of democratic participation and socioeconomic solidarity enabled by citizenship in a determi- nate political community, on the one hand, with planetary commitments to a world constitution, cosmopolitan democracy, and a global public sphere, on the other. Traversing such debates and proposals is the spirit of federalism, which now reappears fifty years after it flashed up in that historical opening between, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, the “no longer” of late colonialism and the “not yet” of the Cold War order.84