Reviewed by: Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World by Gary Wilder Brett A. Berliner (bio) Wilder, Gary. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2015. Freedom, it turns out, was—and is—complex, especially for colonized peoples. Post World War II colonial activists, revolutionaries who actively struggled against the European imperial order and were instrumental in decolonization and the creation of independent, autonomous national states in Africa, have long been lionized. By contrast, these radicals and, later, intellectuals and historians have not always so judiciously considered the ideas of individuals who advocated for decolonization as something other than the establishment of independent national states. Perhaps these latter critics will be more judicious, now, after reading Gary Wilder’s Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World, a thoughtful and challenging work on the often maligned Negritude thinkers, poets, and politicians Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor, both of whom presciently understood that decolonization with formal independence was no guarantee for “substantive freedom” (2). [End Page 229] Rather than retelling the often tortuous machinations of French decolonization and the resulting creation both of Departments in the Antilles and of new nations in Africa, Wilder explores the political forms that Césaire and Senghor imagined were possible after the War. Wilder’s task is ambitious: to “think with” Césaire and Senghor, both of whom imagined and favored decolonization as the creation of a democratic French federation; in addition, Wilder explores the temporality of the politics and poetics in Césaire’s and Senghor’s writing, and, finally, he wishes to do nothing less than “decolonize intellectual history” (11). Césaire, the poet, may be best known for his interwar masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to The Native Land. But Wilder is not interested in situating Césaire in the now well-known fertile, interwar diaspora in Paris that helped give rise to the poem and, with Senghor, Negritude. Rather, Wilder’s contribution is to map Césaire’s wartime writing in Martinique in the avant-garde, rather surrealist journal he published with Suzanne Césaire, his wife, and René Ménil, his friend. In a close, insightful reading of Césaire’s poetry in Tropiques, Wilder argues that Césaire wished to go beyond focusing on recovering a black identity for the projection onto the world of an Antillean model of humanity. Césaire’s concept of humanity, Wilder contends, is further developed in his essay on “Poetry and Knowledge,” written first for a conference he attended in Haiti in 1944, and reprinted in Tropiques in 1945. In this essay, Césaire articulates an elevated form of reason: “poetic knowledge,” where “all the pasts, all the futures . . . [are] summoned”; it is a way of knowing, Wilder interprets, “through which modern antinomies are not denied but transcended” (30). This liberating temporal thinking, which overcomes antinomies, is characteristically “untimely,” a concept central to Wilder’s argument. The untimely, he posits, is when “conventional distinctions between past, present and future no longer obtain . . . [and can] lead social actors . . . to act as if they inhabited an epoch that had already passed or had not yet arrived. . . . [which] can serve either transformative or conservative ends” (37). Analyzing Walter Benjamin’s discussion of time, to name just one among a constellation of thinkers discussed here, Wilder elaborates on the untimely, more simply, as a drawing on the past “not to recognize it . . . as ‘the way it really was’ but to grasp the revolutionary possibilities of the present,” which was one of Césaire’s major contributions (45). In other words, Wilder suggests, we should examine the historical references a social actor makes to understand their intentions. Senghor, too, Wilder argues, developed a poetic imagination that opened possibilities and was profoundly political, contrary to how many characterized the Negritude movement. Indeed, as late as 1976, when he was speaking in Martinique, Senghor defended Negritude as about more than being and living black and privileging cultural celebration: “politics,” Senghor asserted, “must be in the service of culture and not culture in the service of politics” (51). Wilder then returns to Senghor’s immediate postwar poetry...