Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World par by Gary Wilder

Abstract

Reviews 255 societal attitudes toward the various facets of men’s and women’s experience of the conflict. On these foundations, Simon-Carrère has written a book that is not only informative, but also very readable. While the content of the book is worth the attention of any scholar of French culture and society of the First World War, its stylistic readability makes the book accessible to a less specialized readership as well. Ohio University Christopher Coski Wilder, Gary. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8223-5850-3. Pp. 384. $26.30. Wilder’s book is not only a must-read text for those who are interested in critical theory and intellectual history, but also an insightful inquiry with great scholarly depth.Among numerous critical approaches, Freedom Time can be read as a romantic vision of Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor’s aesthetics and politics. Wilder’s investigations aim at showing these thinkers’unapologetic desire to stay within and to defend a reformed French empire as an alternative to national independence. The book is a rereading of Césaire and Senghor’s literary writings that informs their political actions and ideologies during the postwar time and beyond. Wilder’s main thesis, as the title of the book seems to imply, refutes the old paradigms that equated “colonial emancipation to national liberation and self-determination to state sovereignty” (4). Wilder legitimately re-questions the concept of freedom which is at the center of this inquiry. Inspired by critical theorists like Theodor Adorno,W.E.B. Du Bois, Hannah Arendt, Frederic Cooper, Wilder seems to sympathize with Césaire and Senghor’s epistemological posture in that national liberation is not conducive to human emancipation, and self-determination does not necessarily require state sovereignty as antinomies of freedom. According to a certain federalist wave that has received Wilder’s support, nation-state appears to be an accidental occurrence in light of past millennia of kingship and imperial system. This historical perspective became the rationale for Freedom Time, and Wilder succeeds through a thorough study of Césaire and Senghor’s political actions and literary works. But their pragmatic utopian visions of self-determination with state sovereignty can only be grasped or understood in light of their distinctive orientation to anti-colonialism as Wilder convincingly argues (7). Despite Césaire and Senghor’s disillusionment with their quest for integration into and acceptance by France’s imperial nation,“working through empire and unthinking France had characterized their public lives by their systematic rejection of being others and their appropriation of Frenchness as they claimed to be the rightful insiders of “radical traditions of French politics and thought” (7). Wilder shows that Césaire and Senghor, in the tradition of Toussaint Louverture and Victor Schoelcher, redefined decolonization as a process of reconfiguring France’s imperial domination rather than ending it completely. By challenging so-called European universalism, Freedom Time reminds us that these Antillean and African thinkers’ scholarship is an invitation to deterritorialize social thought, to decolonize intellectual history and to approach modernity as a global process that belongs to humanity through“historical constellations” (13). In brief, what links all nine chapters of Freedom Time is the way Wilder masterfully applies the concept of “untimeliness”as a pedagogical tool to undo the concept of anachronism or to make it obsolete. Therefore, “the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous” event is always at work (40). Although Wilder fails to reassert the exceptional character of Haitian slaves’emancipation (or any other slaves’ revolts) as ontologically justified and their unfinished national independence inevitable, his book is a compelling epistemological intervention to rethink our relationship to the past and reevaluate all universal claims. South Plainfield High School (NJ) Claudy Delné Zielonka, Jan. Is the EU Doomed? Madden, MA: Polity, 2014. ISBN 978-0-745683973 . Pp. 128. $10. Topoi of apocalyptic doom have been with us since time immemorial. If anyone still thinks that their specter has deserted our times, all they have to do is read Zielonka’s book. For the author, the occasion for the resurgence of this particular topos lies in the...