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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Public Culture 104 This essay focuses on Aimé Césaire’s post – World War II commitment to colo- nial emancipation without national independence. It examines how his constitu- tional initiatives to enact a future with France in an age of decolonization may be read as politically untimely and strategic utopian engagements with the complex problem of (colonial) freedom. I will suggest that they can be grasped as such only if we recognize that Césaire’s 1946 program to transform Antillean colonies into French departments and his subsequent attempt to reconstitute France as a federal republic were mediated by the spirits of Louverture and Victor Schoelcher and the legacies of the 1790s revolution in Saint-Domingue and the 1848 abolition of slavery. At these crucial turning points, imperial conditions had created the pos- sibility of nonnational colonial emancipation even as certain kinds of instituted liberty themselves obstructed the prospect of substantive freedom. For subsequent generations, such failed initiatives then became futures past that condensed not yet realized but ever-available emancipatory potentialities. By revisiting Césaire’s discredited and outmoded projects for nonnational colo- nial emancipation, this inquiry seeks to reflect critically on openings within the postwar order that were foreclosed by a nationalist logic of decolonization. It also pays special attention to the layered histories and temporal condensations entailed in Césaire’s political interventions. And through reference to contemporary Mar- tinique it suggests how his vision in that opening may speak directly to the chal- lenges and opportunities of our postcolonial present. Finally, in light of his recent death, it raises the more general question of Césaire’s historical legacy. The Problem of Freedom and the Time of Utopia In his landmark study of postemancipation society in colonial Jamaica, the his- torian Thomas C. Holt figures the British abolition of slavery in 1833 as a “prob- lem of freedom.”5 He not only demonstrates that freedom for slaves immediately became a problem for powerful whites who could no longer directly compel emancipated black cultivators to work on plantations. Through his account of the coercive and restricted free labor regime actually instituted by emancipation, Holt also indicates that freedom immediately became a problem for former slaves as well. Abolition, we learn, marked the commencement rather than the conclusion of a modern form of colonial racism. Slave emancipation instituted a regime of freedom from which slaves would now struggle to be emancipated. In this essay 5. Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832 – 1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).