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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Public Culture 108 to be a self-surpassing project. For him, the 1946 law was a constitutional act, a founding legal initiative that derived from and would radically alter the form of the imperial nation-state by creating a citizenship that built on the imperial his- tory that had bound metropolitan and Antillean populations together within an interdependent entity.11 Departmentalization was as much a utopian as it was a pragmatic project. According to Césaire’s vision it contained an internal logic that would lead from formal legal liberty to substantive socioeconomic independence to significant social reorganization within the Antilles. The dynamic process of integrating for- mer colonies into the unitary republic would also require that the French nation- state itself be reconfigured. Césaire’s vision may be read as guided by a timely critique of current conditions. Yet it was also an untimely challenge to the Fourth Republic, which worked to maintain France as an imperial power, as well as to the dominant current of revolutionary decolonization, whose presumed telos was national independence. It was both a strategic intervention into an existing politi- cal field and a utopian anticipation of a fantasmatic postcolonial order that did not yet exist.12 The Spirit of Schoelcher Throughout the 1940s, while he pursued departmentalization, Césaire’s politi- cal imagination was animated by the spirit of Schoelcher, the socialist legislator primarily responsible for the abolition of slavery following the 1848 Revolution in France. Césaire’s desire to engage in a dialogue with the dead seems to have been nourished during the occupation of Martinique by a Vichyist administration. Here, along with his wife, Suzanne, and their collaborator, René Ménil, Césaire edited Tropiques, the avant-garde journal that combined an interest in modernist literature, Antillean ethnology, and vitalist social thought. This legendary publi- cation became a medium through which these intellectuals frequently conjured the spirits of cultural and political predecessors whose vitality they sought to awaken in a moment of historical crisis. 11. See Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 12. Jean-Claude William explains that many on the Martinican left believed that the island would be integrating itself into a France that was about to be transformed into a socialist society (“Aimé Césaire: Les contrariétés de la conscience nationale” [“Aimé Césaire: Contrarieties of the National Conscience”], in 1946 – 1996: Cinquante ans de départementalisation outre-mer [1946 – 1996: Fifty Years of Overseas Departmentalization], ed. Fred Constant and Justin Daniel [Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997], 320).