Untimely vision: Aimé césaire, decolonization, utopia

Public Culture

Volumn 21, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 101-140

  Wilder, Gary ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 70249138019     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: 15278018     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-2008-023     Document Type: Article

References (205)

1. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).
2. See Achille Mbembe, "African Modes of Self-Writing," Public Culture 14 (2002): 239-73.
3. Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005)
4. For Kosellek, in any given epoch there exists a historically specific relation between present and future that determines its sense of historical temporality as well, therefore, as the kinds of historical narratives that it produces. Reinhart Kosellek, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
5. Here I build directly on the insights about reified objects, emancipatory potentiality, and historical temporality in the work of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Ernst Bloch
6. Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
7. I thus seek to embrace the radical potential of political imagination while respecting Karl Marx's critique of historically ungrounded and politically unmediated utopian fantasies. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: International, 1948), 39-42. This understanding of utopia resonates with, though differs from, more minimal or formal attempts to recuperate utopia as either the human capacity to imagine a radically alternative social totality (Adorno) or the valorization of political fantasy as such (Fredric Jameson). It also differs from Jacques Derrida's conception of messianic waiting without expectation for a democracy to come that denigrates politics (as necessarily instrumental) and deifies ethics (transhistorically).
8. Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch, "Something's Missing: A Conversation between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing (1964)," in Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 1-17.
9. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (London: Routledge, 1994).
10. Fredric Jameson, "The Politics of Utopia," New Left Review, no. 25 (2004): 35-54.
11. Ernst Bloch, "Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics," New German Critique, no. 11 (1977): 22-38.
12. Kosellek, Futures Past, 95, 237-46, 266
13. Benjamin invites us to listen carefully for "a sort of theological whispered intelligence dealing with matters discredited and obsolete" ("Some Reflections on Kafka," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: Schocken, 1969], 144). Jameson points to the inverse process: "Utopias in fact come to us as barely audible messages from a future that may never come into being" ("The Politics of Utopia," 54). Adorno writes that "our thinking heeds a potential that waits in the object" and also that "the interpretive eye ... sees more in a phenomenon than what it is-and solely because of what it is." His negative dialectics therefore entail "the penetration of ... hardened objects" by means of "the possibility of which their reality has cheated the objects and which is non-etheless visible in each one."
14. For Adorno, "cognition of the object in its constellation is cognition of the process stored in the object." In this way, "the history locked in the object ... is delivered" (Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton [New York: Continuum, 1983], 19, 28, 52, 163).
15. Journal officiel de la République française (hereafter JORF), Documents de l'Assemblée nationale constituante, February 26, 1946, 519
16. In response to critics of his support for the 1946 law, Césaire repeatedly explained that departmentalization corresponded to the longtime wishes of the Antillean people and enjoyed broad public support in the postwar period, especially among Communists, workers, and civil service employees. It was opposed only by a minority of right-wing white békés. Césaire and his colleagues seized a historic opportunity to pass a radical anticolonial law in a brief opening when Martinican and French politics were dominated by Communist legislators. For an overview of Martinique during the postwar period, see Armand Nicolas, Histoire de la Martinique: De 1939 à 1971 (History of Martinique: From 1939 to 1971) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1998).
17. See Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)
18. 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)
19. Aimé Césaire, "Hommage à Victor Schoelcher" ("Homage to Victor Schoelcher"), in Tropiques, nos. 13-14 (1945), reprinted in Tropiques, 1941-1945: Collection complète (Tropiques, 1941-1945: Complete Collection) (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1994), 230.
20. Césaire was referring to the popular unrest that compelled administrators in Martinique to abolish slavery before the formal emancipation decree had arrived from Paris. "Discours prononcé par M. Aimé Césaire" ("Speech Made by Aimé Césaire"), in Gaston Monnerville, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire, Commémoration du centenaire de l'abolition de l'esclavage: Discours prononcés à la Sorbonne le 27 avril 1948 (Commemoration of the Centenary of the Abolition of Slavery: Speeches Made in the Sorbonne on April 27, 1948) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), 23-33.
21. For a closer reading of this intervention, see Gary Wilder, "Race, Reason, Impasse: Césaire, Fanon, and the Legacy of Emancipation," Radical History Review, no. 90 (2004): 31-58.
22. Césaire also develops this argument in "Hommage à Victor Schoelcher" and "Victor Schoelcher et l'abolition de l'esclavage" ("Victor Schoelcher and the Abolition of Slavery"), in Victor Schoelcher, Esclavage et colonisation (Slavery and Colonization) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), 1-28.
23. Césaire, "Hommage à Victor Schoelcher," "Discours prononcé," and "Victor Schoelcher et l'abolition." Schoelcher's evolving political vision may be traced through his writings in Esclavage et colonisation. For comprehensive accounts of Schoelcher's life and political initiatives, see Nelly Schmidt, Victor Schoelcher et l'abolition de l'esclavage (Victor Schoelcher and the Abolition of Slavery) (Paris: Fayard, 1994).
24. Anne Girollet, Victor Schoelcher, abolitionniste et républicain: Approche juridique et politique de l'oeuvre d'un fondateur de la République (Victor Schoelcher, Abolitionist and Republican: Juridical and Political Approach of the Work of a Founder of the Republic) (Paris: Karthala, 2000)
25. Myriam Cottias, " 'L'oubli du passé' contre la 'citoyenneté': Troc et ressentiment à la Martinique (1848-1946)" (" 'Forgetting the Past' for 'Citizenship': Barter and Resentment in Martinique [1848-1946]"), in Constant and Daniel, 1946-1996, 293-313.
26. Mickaëlla Perina, Citoyenneté et sujetion aux Antilles francophones (Citizenship and Subjection in the French-Speaking Antilles) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1997), 16-28.
27. See Victor Schoelcher, Polémique coloniale (1882-1886) (Colonial Polemic [1882-1886]) (Fort-de-France: Désormeaux, 1979)
28. On the specificity of "colonial democracy" in Martinique under the Third Republic, see Fred Constant, La retraite aux flambeaux: Société et politique en Martinique (Paris: Éditions Caribéennes, 1988), 27-66. Note that Schoelcher also supported Victor Hugo's federalist vision of an "États-Unis d'Europe."
29. Césaire, "Hommage à Victor Schoelcher," 233-34.
30. Césaire, "Victor Schoelcher et l'abolition," 27. Césaire referred to Schoelcher as the figure whom Grégoire had prophetically called forth to continue the still incomplete work of abolition that Grégoire had initiated during the French Revolution. Aimé Césaire, "Discours d'inauguration de la place de l'abbé Grégoire, Fort-de-France, 28 décembre 1950" ("Speech at the Place de l'abbé Grégoire, Fort-de-France, December 28, 1950"), in Oeuvre historique et politique (Historical and Political Work), vol. 3 of Oeuvres complètes (Complete Works) (Fort-de-France: Desormeaux, 1976), 429.
31. Césaire, "Discours prononcé," 415.
32. Césaire, "Discours prononcé," 413-15; Césaire, "Hommage à Victor Schoelcher," 233
33. Césaire, "Hommage à Victor Schoelcher," 233
34. Césaire, "Discours prononcé," 415
35. Césaire, "Discours prononcé," 413-14
36. Césaire, "Hommage à Victor Schoelcher," 235;
37. Césaire, "Discours prononcé," 411
38. Césaire, "Discours prononcé," 411
39. Césaire, "Discours prononcé," 411
40. On "constellations," see Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2003), 27-56;
41. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 462-63.
42. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, 261, 262, 264.
43. Theodor Adorno, "The Actuality of Philosophy," in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O'Connor (London: Blackwell, 2000), 23-39.
44. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics (New York: Free Press, 1977).
45. Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 90-106
46. Césaire, "Victor Schoelcher et l'abolition," 26-27
47. Césaire, "Victor Schoelcher et l'abolition," 27. But when Césaire later became an advocate of autonomy for Martinique, he criticized how the Right retrospectively recuperated Schoelcher as a departmentalist (JORF, Assemblée nationale, 2e séance, December 17, 1982, 8489-90).
48. Aimé Césaire, "Pour la transformation de la Martinique en region dans le cadre d'une union française federée" ("For the Transformation of Martinique into the Framework of a French Union Federation"), in Oeuvres complètes, 3:478
49. Quoted in Ernest Moutoussamy, Aimé Césaire: Député à l'Assemblée nationale, 1945-1993 (Aimé Césaire: Deputy to the National Assembly, 1945-1993) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1993), 54. This volume republishes extensive portions of Césaire's postwar parliamentary and political discourses. In parliamentary debates Césaire forcefully challenged the delay between political and social assimilation. See his interventions in JORF, Assemblée nationale, 1e séance, July 10, 1947, 2895.
50. JORF, Assemblée nationale, 2e séance, December 29, 1947, 6445;
51. JORF, Assemblée nationale, 2e séance, July 16, 1948. On the French state's reluctance to implement social legislation in the overseas departments, see Bertrand François-Lubin, "Les méandres de la politique sociale outre-mer" ("The Meanders of Overseas Social Policy"), in Constant and Daniel, 1946-1996, 73-83.
52. Quoted in Moutoussamy, Aimé Césaire, 40, 54
53. Césaire, "Pour la transformation," 482
54. Quoted in Moutoussamy, Aimé Césaire, 54
55. His shift was also informed by the worsening war in Algeria, which he challenged in the assembly
56. Césaire, "Pour la transformation," 478
57. Césaire, "Pour la transformation," 478. He also develops a related but different account of the dialectical overcoming of departmentalization in his introduction to Daniel Guérin, Les Antilles décolonisées (The Decolonized Antilles) (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956), 7-15.
58. Césaire, "Pour la transformation," 478
59. Quoted in Moutoussamy, Aimé Césaire, 74
60. Quoted in Moutoussamy, Aimé Césaire, 62
61. Césaire, Lettre à Maurice Thorez (Letter to Maurice Thorez) (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956), 13
62. Césaire, "Pour la transformation," 479-92. For the federalist program advocated by African colonial legislators, see Senghor's parliamentary interventions collected in Léopold Sédar Senghor, Liberté 2: Nation et voie africaine du socialisme (Liberty 2: Nation and the African Way of Socialism) (Paris: Seuil, 1971)
63. Césaire, "Pour la transformation," 488
64. Roger Toumson and Simonne Henry-Valmore, Aimé Césaire: Le nègre inconsolé (Aimé Césaire: The Unconsoled Negro) (La Roque d'Anthéron: Vents d'Ailleurs, 2002), 95-97
65. Césaire's "Poésie et connaissance" ("Poetry and Knowledge") was then published in Tropiques, no. 12 (1945), and reprinted in Tropiques, 1941-1945, 157-70.
66. Aimé Césaire, Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai: Entretiens avec Françoise Vergès (Negro I Am, Negro I Will Remain: Discussions with Françoise Vergès) (Paris: Michel, 2005), 56
67. Aimé Césaire, Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial (Toussaint Louverture: The French Revolution and the Colonial Problem) (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1962).
68. Césaire, La tragédie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe) (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1970). The latter may be read as a parable of decolonization that, like Césaire's 1966 play about Patrice Lumumba, Une saison au Congo (A Season in Congo) (Paris: Seuil, 2001), enacts and meditates on the very interpenetration of historical epochs that I explore. These plays illuminate the underlying continuities among Césaire's politics, criticism, and aesthetics. They also resonate with Edouard Glissant's later call for a "prophetic vision of the past" in his 1961 play organized around "the simultaneity of the two time frames in which Toussaint lives" and marked by "the equivalence of past and present" (preface to the 1st ed. of Monsieur Toussaint: A Play, trans. J. Michael Dash and Edouard Glissant [Boulder, Colo.: Reinner, 2005], 15, 16).
69. See Victor Schoelcher, Colonies étrangères et Haiti (Foreign Colonies and Haiti) (Pointe-à-Pitre: Désormeaux, 1973), vol. 2.
70. Victor Schoelcher, Conférence sur Toussaint Louverture, général en chef de l'armée de Saint-Domingue (Conference on Toussaint Louverture, General in Chief of the Army of Saint-Domingue) (Port-au-Prince: Panorama, 1966). Following the talk, Ernest Legouvé, one of the organizers, presented a celebratory summary of Schoelcher's role in the 1848 abolition of slavery, concluding with the proposal that he now be called "Schoelcher Louverture" (51).
71. Victor Schoelcher, Vie de Toussaint Louverture (Life of Toussaint Louverture) (Paris: Karthala, 1982)
72. Césaire, Toussaint Louverture, 345
73. Césaire, Toussaint Louverture, 250
74. This reading of Louverture's politics is based in part on his own writings, which are generously excerpted in Schoelcher, Vie de Toussaint Louverture;
75. Césaire, Toussaint Louverture;
76. Toussaint L'Ouverture, ed. George F. Tyson Jr. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1973)
77. It is also indebted to the important and insightful accounts provided in C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1963);
78. Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London: Verso, 1989).
79. Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991).
80. David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).
81. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
82. Scholars have generally been more concerned with explaining Louverture's descent into despotism than with examining the particular political vision expressed in his constitutional act. The latter is usually understood as a de facto declaration of independence, an attempt to buy time until such a declaration could be made, or a missed opportunity to do so properly. For a notable exception, see Claude Moïse, Le projet national de Toussaint Louverture (The National Project of Toussaint Louverture) (Port-au-Prince: Mémoire, 2001). Dubois, Avengers of the New World, also takes seriously Louverture's commitment to renegotiate the colony's relationship to France. In "Louverture, Dessalines, and the Quest for Sovereignty" (unpublished paper), Dubois argues persuasively that Louverture chose not to declare independence. On Toussaint's insistence that the people of Saint-Domingue retain French nationality.
83. see Julia Gaffield, "Complexities of Imagining Haiti: A Study of National Constitutions, 1801-1807," Journal of Social History 41 (2007): 81-103
84. See Dubois, Avengers of the New World
85. Césaire, Toussaint Louverture, 279, 283
86. Schoelcher, Vie de Toussaint Louverture;
87. Dubois, Avengers of the New World
88. This proliferation of discourse must be recalled as a counterpoint to Michel Rolph Trouillot's influential argument about the later silence and unthinkability of the Haitian Revolution in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1997)
89. See also Charles Forsdick, "Situating Haiti: On Some Early Nineteenth-Century Representations of Toussaint Louverture," International Journal of Francophone Studies 10 (2007): 17-34
90. See Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism) (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2000)
91. Césaire, "Culture et colonisation" ("Culture and Colonisation"), Présence africaine, nos. 8-10 (1956): 190-205
92. Césaire, introduction to Guérin, Les Antilles décolonisées;
93. Césaire, "L'homme de culture et ses responsabilités" ("The Man of Culture and His Responsibilities"), Présence africaine, nos. 24-25 (1959): 116-22;
94. Césaire, "Crise dans les départements d'outre-mer ou crise de la départementalisation?" ("Crisis in the Overseas Departments or a Departmentalization Crisis?"), Présence africaine, no. 36 (1961): 109-11.
95. Dubois's work demonstrates that such anxious and prophetic warnings of Antillean revolutions that would come unless slavery were abolished extend back to prerevolutionary Saint-Domingue in the writings of Louis Sebastien Mercier and the abbé Raynal. See Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 57-59. Césaire was also evoking a tradition of successive uprisings, unrest, and strikes in Martinique extending from the 1820s to the 1960s.
96. Césaire made similar points about the long-term commitments, lifelong struggles, and repeated setbacks of Grégoire and Schoelcher (Césaire, "Discours d'inauguration de la place de l'abbé Grégoire"; JORF, December 17, 1982)
97. Here we should recall Adorno's insight about Franz Kafka's "literalness" through which he "explodes [an object] by taking it more exactly at its word than it does itself." Theodor Adorno, "Notes on Kafka," in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 151.
98. In addition to Marx's suggestion that cooperative labor, large-scale industrial production, and joint stock companies already signaled an incipient if still alienated form of socialism, we might recall Benjamin's claim, borrowed from Gershom Scholem, that for Jews, in the post-Messianic "world to come ... everything will be the same as here-only a little bit different." Walter Benjamin, "In the Sun," in Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 2:664.
99. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, ed. Gershom Scholem (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 123n. Similarly, Adorno suggests that only a "hair's breadth" separates knowledge conditioned by the world as it actually exists from knowledge of the world as it would appear from the standpoint of redemption.
100. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 2005), 247.
101. For defenses of state sovereignty as necessary for Third World social democracy, see Samir Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World (London: Zed, 1990)
102. Pheng Cheah, Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007)
103. For empathetic and insightful interpretations of Césaire's postwar projects that resonate with my own, see Michel Giraud, "De la négritude à la créolité: Une évolution paradoxale à l'ère départmentale" ("From Negritude to Creoleness: A Paradoxical Evolution during the Departmentalization Period"), in Constant and Daniel, 1946-1996, 373-401; William, "Aimé Césaire";
104. Nick Nesbitt, "Departmentalization and the Logic of Decolonization," L'esprit créateur 47 (2007): 32-43
105. Cf. Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
106. Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006).
107. Colonial histories that implicitly construct constellations between distinct epochs and address processes of temporal refraction include Césaire's and Glissant's works on Toussaint (cited above)
108. James, Black Jacobins;
109. as well as Scott, Conscripts of Modernity
110. Richard Price, The Convict and the Colonel: A Story of Colonialism and Resistance in the Caribbean (Boston: Beacon, 1998)
111. William F. S. Miles, Elections and Ethnicity in French Martinique: A Paradox in Paradise (New York: Praeger, 1986), 141-58
112. Constant, La retraite aux flambeaux, 67-86
113. Richard D. E. Burton, "The French West Indies à l'heure de l'Europe: An Overview," in French and West Indian: Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana Today, ed. Richard D. E. Burton and Fred Reno (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 1-19;
114. José Nosel, "Appréciation de l'impact économique de la départmentalisation à la Martinique" ("Evaluation of the Economic Impact of Departmentalization in Martinique"), in Constant and Daniel, 1946-1996, 25-71;
115. François-Lubin, "Les méandres de la politique sociale outre-mer";
116. Nicolas, Histoire de la Martinique, 243-86;
117. Alain Anselin, L'émigration antillais en France: La troisième île (Antillean Emigration to France: The Third Island) (Paris: Karthala, 1990)
118. Fred Constant, "La politique migratoire: Essai d'un évaluation" ("Migratory Policy: A Tentative Evaluation"), in Constant and Daniel, 1946-1996, 97-132
119. David Beriss, Black Skin, French Voices: Caribbean Ethnicity and Activism in Urban France (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2004), 1-21, 61-72
120. Madeleine Dobie, "Invisible Exodus: The Cultural Effacement of Antillean Migration," Diaspora 13 (2004): 149-83
121. At the 1971 "Convention pour l'Autonomie des Quatres DOM" at Morne Rouge, representatives from across the anticolonialist Left in all four departments denounced departmentalization and declared their support for self-determination through a new autonomy status. Nicolas, Histoire de la Martinique, 294-95.
122. On the independence movement and parties, see Miles, Elections and Ethnicity, 45-55, 207-16
123. Richard D. E. Burton, "The Idea of Difference in Contemporary French West Indian Thought: Négritude, Antillanité, Créolité," in Burton and Reno, French and West Indian, 150-52
124. Burton, "French West Indies," 16-18. Alfred Marie-Jeanne of the Mouvement Indépendantiste Martiniquais Party was elected deputy to the National Assembly in 1997 and president of the Conseil Régionale in 1998. But according to Justin Daniel, this is more a function of his association with effective management and good governance than of popular support for national independence ("L'espace politique martiniquais à l'épreuve de la départmentalisation" ("Martinican Political Space and the Test of Departmentalization"), in Constant and Daniel, 1946-1996, 250-52). (In 1999, along with the presidents of the Regional Councils of Guiana and Guadeloupe, Marie-Jeanne signed "La déclaration de Basse-Terre" demanding official autonomous status for the three departments.)
125. Césaire served as Martinique's deputy to the National Assembly (1945-93), mayor of Fortde-France (1945-2001), and president of the Conseil Général (1945-49, 1955-70) and the Conseil Régional (1983-86)
126. On Gaullism in Martinique, see Miles, Elections and Ethnicity, 129-38
127. Daniel, "L'éspace politique," 240-47
128. Nicolas, Histoire de la Martinique, 64-85, 178-242
129. A survey of Antillean leaders conducted by Arvin W. Murch in the late 1960s indicated a high level of support for departmental status ("Political Integration as an Alternative to Independence in the French Antilles," American Sociological Review 33 [1968]: 544-62).
130. Such concerns led the Martinican public to vote against François Mitterrand in the May 1981 presidential elections despite the close alliance between the PPM and the French Socialist Party. William F. S. Miles, "Mitterrand in the Caribbean: Socialism (?) Comes to Martinique," Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 27, no. 3 (1985): 63-79. The same dynamic appears to have been at work in the December 7, 2003, referendum on whether to create a single territorial council, which was defeated by an electorate reluctant to make any adjustment to the department's legal status.
131. See Justin Daniel, "Les élus face à la réforme institutionnelle et à l'acte II de la décentralisation: La difficile conciliation d'aspirations contradictoires" ("Elected Representatives Confronted with Institutional Reform and Act 2 of Decentralization: The Difficulty of Reconciling Contradictory Aspirations"), and Ulrike Zander, "La consultation du 7 décembre 2003 et les manifestations d'inquiétude de l'opinion martiniquaise" ("The Referendum of 7 December 2003 and Expressions of Anxiety in Martinican Public Opinion"), in Entre assimilation et émancipation: L'outre-mer français dans l'impasse? (Between Assimilation and Emancipation: Overseas France at an Impasse?), ed. Thierry Michalon (Paris: Les Perséides, 2006), 113-31, 132-51.
132. On this dynamic at work in Réunion, see Françoise Vergès, Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Métissage (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 123-84.
133. Miles, Elections and Ethnicity, 230-46
134. Constant, La retraite aux flambeaux, 141-221
135. Daniel, "L'espace politique martiniquais," 233-37, 247-52
136. Yves Bernabé, Viviane Capgras, and Pascal Murgier, "Les politiques culturelles à la Martinique depuis la décentralisation" ("Cultural Policies in Martinique since Decentralization"), in Constant and Daniel, 1946-1996, 133-52
137. David Blatt, "Immigrant Politics in a Republican Nation," in Postcolonial Cultures in France, ed. Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney (New York: Routledge, 1997), 40-58.
138. Alain Blérald, Négritude et politique aux Antilles (Negritude and Policy in the Antilles) (Paris: Éditions Caribéennes, 1981);
139. Edouard Glissant, Le discours antillais (Antillean Discourse) (Paris: Seuil, 1981)
140. Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, Eloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness) (Paris: Gallimard/Presses Universitaires Créoles, 1989)
141. Raphaël Confiant, Aimé Césaire: Une traversée paradoxale du siècle (Aimé Césaire: A Paradoxical Crossing of the Century) (Paris: Stock, 1993)
142. Maryse Condé, "Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer," Yale French Studies, no. 83 (1993): 121-35
143. J. Michael Dash, Edouard Glissant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
144. Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, Jean Bernabé, and Lucien Taylor, "Creolité Bites," Transition, no. 74 (1997): 124-61
145. Burton, "Idea of Difference"
146. Giraud, "De la négritude à la créolité"
147. Richard Price and Sally Price, "Shadowboxing in the Mangrove," Cultural Anthropology 12 (1997): 3-36
148. David A. B. Murray, "The Cultural Citizen: Negations of Race and Language in the Making of Martiniquais," Anthropological Quarterly 70 (1997): 79-90
149. Beriss, Black Skin, French Voices, 67-104
150. Such debates marked commemorations in 1998 of the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. This memorial spirit informed the 2001 loi Taubira, which classified slavery as a crime against humanity and mandated that the history of slavery be taught in French public schools. Following the recommendations of the Comité pour la Mémoire de l'Esclavage, whose president was Maryse Condé, President Jacques Chirac established May 10 as an official holiday commemorating the abolition of slavery. The politics of memory also surrounded protests against the reprehensible Article 4 of the law of February 23, 2005, which publicly recognized the "positive" aspects of overseas French colonialism and mandated that they be taught to French schoolchildren. During this period a small but vocal campaign by Antilleans to demand that the state pay reparations to the descendants of French slaves emerged. Beriss, Black Skin, French Voices, 25-33, 51-54;
151. Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 423-38
152. Comité pour la Mémoire de l'Esclavage, Mémoires de la traite négrière, de l'esclavage et de leurs abolitions (Memories of the Slave Trade, Slavery, and Their Abolition), April 12, 2005, www.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr/rapports -publics/054000247/index.shtml
153. Françoise Vergès, La mémoire enchaînée: Questions sur l'esclavage (Chained Memory: Questions about Slavery) (Paris: Michel, 2006)
154. and in Esprit, no. 332 (2007), a special issue titled "Antilles: La république ignorée," see Daniel Maximin, Stéphane Pocrain, and Christiane Taubira, "Quelle mémoire de l'esclavage? Table ronde" ("Which Memory of Slavery? Roundtable"), 62-70
155. Élisabeth Landi and Silyane Larcher, "La mémoire coloniale vue de Fort-de-France" ("Colonial Memory from the Perspective of Fort-de-France"), 84-97
156. Fred Constant, "Pour une lecture sociale des revendications mémorielles 'victimaires' " ("Toward a Social Reading of 'Victims' Memorial Demands"), 105-16
157. Patrick Weil, "Politique de la mémoire: L'interdit et la commémoration" ("Politics of Memory: Prohibition and Commemoration"), 124-43
158. Daniel, "L'espace politique martiniquais," 247-52.
159. Emmanuel Jos, "Identité culturelle et identité politique: Le cas Martiniquais" ("Cultural Identity and Political Identity: The Case of Martinicans"), in Constant and Daniel, 1946-1996, 335-71.
160. Daniel, "Les élus face à la réforme institutionnelle," 123-37
161. Civil servants in the DOM are paid the famous 40 percent premium over their colleagues in metropolitan agencies. Various forms of discrimination positive have extended opportunity preferences to Antillean populations regarding employment, training, and social security. In the Constitution of October 4, 1958, Article 73 allowed that in the DOMs the laws of the republic are subject to "adaptations according [tenant] to the particular characteristics and constraints of these collectivities" (www .conseil-constitutionnel.fr/textes/constit.htm). A decree on April 26, 1960, gave the Conseils Généraux in the Antilles a special right to advise the central government on legislation that will affect the DOMs in particular ways. The decentralization law of March 2, 1982, led local governmental structures in Martinique to continue to evolve in ways that distinguished it from the metropolitan model. A political struggle thereby commenced over the feasibility of competing governing bodies (the Conseil Général and the Conseil Régional) whose jurisdictions were geographically coextensive, as well as over the constitutionality of a novel "Assemblée Unique" for this peculiar "monodepartmental region." Miles, Ethnicity and Elections, 231-34.
162. Constant, La retraite aux flambeaux, 141-221. Decentralization has continued to evolve through the laws of July 5, 1994, and December 13, 2000; the constitutional revisions of March 28, 2003; the debate over Martinique's legal status around the referendum of December 7, 2003.
163. the law of August 13, 2004. See François-Lubin, "Les méandres de la politique sociale outre-mer," 83-93;
164. Justin Daniel, ed., L'outre-mer à l'épreuve de la décentralisation: Nouveaux cadres institutionnels et difficultés d'adaptation (Overseas France and the Test of Decentralization: New Institutional Frameworks and the Difficulty of Adaptation) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2007).
165. The essays collected in part 2 of Michalon, Entre assimilation et émancipation, 200-362. On legal autonomy, see Anne-Marie Le Pourhiet, "La perception du droit à la Martinique" ("Perceptions of the Law in Martinique"), in Constant and Daniel, 1946-1996, 451-72;
166. Jack Vimon, "Assimilation et dédoublement des ordres normatifs: Le cas des Amérindiens de Guyane française" ("Assimilation and Division of Normative Orders: The Case of the Amerindians of French Guiana"), in Constant and Daniel, 1946-1996, 433-50
167. Daniel, "L'espace politique martiniquais." Other accounts of the specificity of the Martinican political system include Constant, La retraite aux flambeaux
168. Fred Reno, "La créolisation de l'espace publique à la Martinique" ("The Creolization of Public Space in Martinique"), in Constant and Daniel, 1946-1996, 405-32;
169. Reno, "Politics and Society in Martinique," in Burton and Reno, French and West Indian, 34-47
170. Daniel argues that the "autonomization of political space" has also led to its "enlargement," creating a situation in which Martinique has developed multiple allegiances, identifying simultaneously with the Antilles, the wider Caribbean, France, and the EU ("L'espace politique martiniquais," 252). On the EU, see Emmanuel Jos, "The Declaration of the Treaty of Maastricht on the Ultra-peripheral Regions of the Community: An Assessment," in Burton and Reno, French and West Indian, 86-97
171. Daniel, "L'espace politique martiniquais," 242-55. Departmentalization thus expanded the boundaries of "Europe" and created opportunities for Antilleans, as Europeans, to pursue their interests directly through the EU without the intermediation of the French state. Yet, because they are formal departments of France, the Antillean DOMs are excluded from many of the economic subsidies, development funding, and security pacts designed to aid "ultraperipheral" regions of the Union. And its already diminished agricultural economy is further threatened by a common market without protections from low-priced competitors. Historically, Martinique has been only weakly integrated into a Caribbean region, where it has enjoyed better living conditions, social protections, and political stability than its independent counterparts. On comparisons and connections between the French Antillean DOMs and other Caribbean states
172. see Paul Sutton, ed., Dual Legacies in the Contemporary Caribbean: Continuing Aspects of British and French Dominion (London: Cass, 1986)
173. Maurice Burac, "The French Antilles, and the Wider Caribbean," in Burton and Reno, French and West Indian, 98-111
174. Fred Constant and Justin Daniel, eds., Politique et développement dans les Caraîbes (Policy and Development in the Caribbean) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1999) esp.
175. Justin Daniel, "Crise ou mutations des institutions: La quête de nouveaux modèles" ("Crisis or Institutional Transformation: The Search for New Models"), 99-153
176. Daniel, "Développement et compétition politique: Vers une mutation du modèle portoricain?" ("Development and Political Competition: Toward a Transformation of the Puerto Rican Model?"), in Les îles caraïbes: Modèles politiques et stratégíes de développement (The Caribbean Islands: Political Models and Strategies of Development) (Paris: Karthala, 1996), 185-223
177. Michel Giraud, "Le malheur d'être partis" ("The Misfortune of Having Left"), Esprit, no. 332 (2007): 49-61.
178. See Serge Letchimy, Discours sur l'Autonomie (Discourse on Autonomy) (Martinique: Ibis Rouge, 2002)
179. Patrick Lozès, Nous, les Noirs de France (We, the Blacks of France) (Paris: Danger Public, 2007)
180. Site Officiel de Christiane Taubira, Députée de Guyane, www.christiane-taubira.org (accessed November 10, 2008).
181. See Daniel, "L'espace politique martiniquais"
182. Daniel, "Crise ou mutations des institutions";
183. Giraud, "De la négritude à la créolité"
184. Giraud, "Le malheur d'être partis";
185. Michel Giraud, "Crispation identitaire et antisémitisme: Le cas d'Antilla" ("Identitarian Retrenchment and Anti-Semitism: The Case of Antilla"), Traces, no. 11 (1985): 129-51
186. Giraud, "Dialectics of Descent and Phenotypes in Racial Classification in Martinique," in Burton and Reno, French and West Indian, 75-85
187. Giraud, "Sur l'assimilation: Les paradoxes d'un objet brouillé" ("On Assimilation: The Paradoxes of a Blurry Object"), in Michalon, Entre assimilation et émancipation, 89-102
188. Giraud, "L'arbre et la forêt: À propos de quelques polémiques récentes" ("The Forest and the Tree: Regarding Certain Recent Polemics"), Esprit, no. 332 (2007): 81-83
189. Maximin, Pocrain, and Taubira, "Quelle mémoire de l'esclavage?" Mention should also be made of their frequent collaborator, the political scientist Fred Constant. It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss the important ways in which Edouard Glissant, from Martinique, and Maryse Condé, from Guadeloupe, continue to extend Césaire's legacy as well.
190. Michel Giraud and Patrick Weil, "À la pointe avancée de la République" ("At the Cutting Edge of the Republic"), Esprit, no. 332 (2007): 48
191. Maximin, Pocrain, and Taubira, "Quelle mémoire de l'esclavage?" 68-69
192. 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
193. Habermas, "Kant's Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years' Hindsight," in Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal, ed. James Bohman and Mattias Lutz-Bachmann (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 113-53
194. 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.
195. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 2:203-10
196. 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.
197. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 475
198. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," 261, 262, 264
199. 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 settled (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, Conversation 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.
200. 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 classify 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.
201. This campaign, which received little support from either Martinicans or the French government, was promoted by the Antillean activist Claude Ribbe and supported by prominent French politicians like François Bayrou and Ségolène Royale. See Claude Ribbe, "Césaire, 'normalien noir,' au Panthéon le 10 mai 2008!" ("Césaire, 'Black Normalien,' in the Panthéon on May 10, 2008!"), April 25, 2008, www.afrik.com/article14141.html.
202. See also Claude Ribbe's blog at www.claude-ribbe.com/dotclear.
203. President Nicolas Sarkozy attended but was not invited to speak. In protest against Sarkozy's support for the 2005 law on the positive aspects of French colonialism, Césaire had earlier refused to meet with him when he visited Martinique. The following year, after the objectionable articles of this law had been eliminated, Césaire did meet with him. 89. Aliker declared that Martinique had lost its greatest son, someone who understood that Martinicans are the only specialists of Martinique.
204. Maximin is here invoking "Parole due," one of Césaire's last published poems (1993). I follow Annette Smith's idiosyncratic translation of "parole due" as "speak now," though, as Laurent Dubois has pointed out to me, it could also mean "words owed." See Annette Smith, " 'A Man Was Here': Aimé Césaire Revisited," Research in African Literatures 37 (2006): 125, 128, 134.
205. Glissant writes that "it may be useful to point out that Toussaint's relations with his deceased companions arise from a tradition, perhaps particular to the Antilles, of casual communication with the dead" (Monsieur Toussaint, 16)