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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Public Culture 138 It has become evident that formal sovereignty cannot guarantee substantive freedom for many postcolonial societies. Global restructuring has disrupted entrenched assumptions about nations as natural containers for social relations and about nationality as the necessary horizon for political association and iden- tification. Such developments may free us from an outmoded logic of decoloniza- tion by creating, following Benjamin, a new “now of recognizability” through which postwar politics reappear and become differently legible.85 We might then be able to recognize Césaire’s imperfect initiatives for colonial overcoming and political emancipation, which have often been dismissed as neocolonial capitula- tion, as cosmopolitan and utopian attempts to awaken futures past and to antici- pate futures to come. To remember Césaire is to remember the future. It is to recall and pursue the unrealized future that he envisioned, one that lies simultane- ously behind us and ahead of us. Coda: Remembering Césaire To say that Césaire leaves a legacy attuned to the political power of transgen- erational remembrance is not to align him with the recent preoccupation with commemoration and historical memory. If Césaire recognized how practices of remembrance might fuel radical political projects, he also criticized the depoliti- cizing tendencies of official commemoration.86 He cultivated a dialogical relation- 85. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 475; Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 261, 262, 264. 86. In 1982 Césaire attacked the French Senate’s attempt to recuperate a proposal by Socialists to create a law commemorating the 1848 abolition of slavery (JORF, December 17, 1982). More recently, he expressed reservations about the Antillean reparations movement on the grounds that it reinforced a “victimization” mentality and risked trivializing the historical trauma by suggesting that an irreparable moral debt could simply be paid off with cash and the matter would appear to be set- tled (Césaire, Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai, 39 – 40). In response to the homages organized in honor of his ninetieth birthday, Césaire commented, “Listen, I am not very fond of these ceremonies. . . . I am not a man of ceremonial display [l’homme de l’étalage cérémoniel].” Patrice Louis, Conver- sation avec Aimé Césaire (Paris: Arléa, 2007), 73. Césaire did not support the move by Alfred Jeanne-Marie to change the name of the historic Lycée Victor Schoelcher to the Lycée Aimé Césaire. See Landi and Larcher, “La mémoire coloniale vue de Fort-de-France,” 84 – 89. Césaire was both a graduate of and a teacher at this school, where his students famously included Frantz Fanon and Edouard Glissant. On October 10, 2007, Césaire sent an urgent demand to the government to clas- sify the Lycée Victor Schoelcher as a protected bâtiment historique insofar as it was “a historical monument” and “a historic document” that “bears witness” to both the struggle for abolition waged by Schoelcher in the 1840s and the generations of intellectuals and leaders taught there since the 1930s. Aimé Césaire to Christine Albanel, Ministre de la Culture et de la Communication, October 10, 2007, www.ppm-martinique.net/Lycee-Schoelcher-Lettre-d-Aime-Cesaire-a-Christine-Albanel -Ministre-de-la-Culture-et-de-la-Communication_a190.html.