Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World

by Gary Wilder

Freedom Time reconsiders decolonization from the perspectives of Aimé Césaire (Martinique) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal) who, beginning in 1945, promoted self-determination without state sovereignty. As politicians, public intellectuals, and poets they struggled to transform imperial France into a democratic federation, with former colonies as autonomous members of a transcontinental polity. In so doing, they revitalized past but unrealized political projects and anticipated impossible futures by acting as if they had already arrived. Refusing to reduce colonial emancipation to national independence, they regarded decolonization as an opportunity to remake the world, reconcile peoples, and realize humanity’s potential. Emphasizing the link between politics and aesthetics, Gary Wilder reads Césaire and Senghor as pragmatic utopians, situated humanists, and concrete cosmopolitans whose postwar insights can illuminate current debates about self-management, postnational politics, and planetary solidarity. Freedom Time invites scholars to decolonize intellectual history and globalize critical theory, to analyze the temporal dimensions of political life, and to question the territorialist assumptions of contemporary historiography.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Africa, Politics, Race, Theory

400 pages, Paperback

First published December 8, 2014

About the author

Gary Wilder is Associate Professor of Anthropology at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars.

Reviews

[Imani ♥ ☮ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Did not love this one. It may be a bit unfair for me to have read this text without having read little to none of Aime Césaire and Senghor beforehand. Regardless, I was disappointed with the author's focus on Europe and the West. This was perhaps the point but I found that I learned about as much about Hannah Arendt and Kant as I did about Césaire and especially Senghor! I also found it disorienting that sometimes I forgot that these are supposedly thinkers part of a Pan-African (or at least internationalist) discourse. I felt like the author was mostly qualifying the authors within the Western modernist tradition (for the point of exposing it as also African in nature but whatever). Some things I think were sacrificed for this. I almost wonder maybe if it's slightly dishonest by cover...

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Features the use of the word “proleptic.”

[Soham Chakraborty · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book about an audaciously imagined decolonization, different from every other movement the world would ever see. Aimé Césaire (Martinique) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal) promoted the ambitious idea self-determination without state sovereignty- i.e a French Empire transitioning into a democratic federation, with former colonies as autonomous members of a transcontinental polity. This dream was never realized, and there is a tragic tone to the retelling of their lost perspectives. But from tragedy let us imagine re-imagined futures.

[Devin Creed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reminding myself to read Leopold Senghor's work on Marxism, humanism , and Christianity.

[Celine · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars

[Anya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honestly it doesn't even really make sense to give this book a rating

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very important argument made in this book. Read it if you are interested in intellectual history or decolonization.