Freedom Time by Gary Wilder
Freedom Time by Gary Wilder
Freedom Time by Gary Wilder
gary wilder
FREEDOM TIME Negritude, Decolonization,
and the Future of the World
Cover art: (top) Léopold Senghor. Felix Man/Picture Post/Getty Images; (bottom) Aimé
Césaire. © Mario Dondero.
For Rachel & Isabel
2 Situating Césaire 17
Antillean Awakening and Global Redemption
3 Situating Senghor 49
African Hospitality and Human Solidarity
This book was born of an intuition while writing a conference paper about
Aimé Césaire’s nonnational orientation to decolonization. I wondered
whether it would make sense to suggest that the Haitian Revolution exempli-
fied Marx’s subsequent demand that the new social revolution draw its “po-
etry” from the future. All I wanted was one quote from Toussaint Louverture
to set up a discussion of why Césaire committed himself to departmentaliza-
tion in 1946. But I fell into a deep rabbit hole.
I reread James’s The Black Jacobins, Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire, DuBois’s
Black Reconstruction, and, of course, Césaire’s writings about abolition and de-
colonization. The conjuncture of freedom struggles and historical temporality in
these texts led me back to Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Ernst Bloch.
Césaire was helping me grasp their arguments in a new way, and vice versa.
I had regarded this paper as unfinished business, a loose thread dangling
from the edge of the book I had recently published on the interwar matrix out
of which the Negritude movement emerged. But the more I pulled, the longer
it got. I suspected that I should make myself stop but was unable to contain
the fascinating mess. My twenty-five-page paper blossomed into a fifty-page
essay, which then grew into a two-hundred-page pile. I wondered whether it
would be wiser to just write the paper on Léopold Sédar Senghor’s nonna-
tionalist thoughts about decolonization. So I read his parliamentary speeches
from the forties and fifties and began to puzzle over what he meant by federal-
ism and what relation it might have with departmentalization. I read Proud-
hon and revisited Marx’s “On the Jewish Question.” When I then turned back
to Césaire’s parliamentary interventions I realized, with some misgiving, that
I was now facing a book on freedom, time, and decolonization. I conceded
that I was not finished writing about Césaire and Senghor. But this book, I
thought, on figures whom I already knew, would be comparatively quick and
easy. Hah!
That was the summer of 2006, a moment when I was personally preoccupied
with time and reckoning, opening and foreclosure, potentiality and loss . . .
pasts conditional and futures anterior. I began writing that original paper while
recovering from major surgery to robotically repair a severely leaking heart
valve. This was only a few months after I became a parent and lost a parent—
following an unraveled year not knowing whether I would miss my daughter’s
birth in California because I was saying good-bye to my dying mother in New
York or miss the chance to say good-bye to her because I was attending to a
newborn.
By then, a few events had already been moving me into the intellectual
space from which this book was written. These included a 2001 conference in
Guadeloupe about the legacy of slavery, organized by Laurent Dubois; this
was where I first wrote about temporal legacies and spoke with Michel Gi-
raud. The 2005 session of the Irvine Summer in Experimental Critical Theory,
hosted by David Theo Goldberg, where, nourished by discussions with Di-
pesh Chakrabarty, Lisa Lowe, and Achille Mbembe, I presented a speculative
talk on the “decolonization that might have been.” And a 2006 conference on
“imperial debris,” organized by Ann Stoler at the New School, for which I first
wrote about Césaire and Toussaint.
Equally catalyzing were the Critical Theory Group at Pomona College;
the seminars I taught at Pomona on the History and Politics of Time, De-
colonization, and Postcolonial France; the year I spent on a Mellon New
Directions Fellowship as a Visiting Fellow of the Human Rights Program at
Harvard Law School, where I audited international law classes with David
Kennedy and grappled with questions of global politics and planetary justice
with Mindy Roseman and a group of international lawyers and activists then
in residence from Brazil, Iran, Kenya, and Palestine; and the opportunity to
share and discuss my work on Césaire with Michel Giraud, Justin Daniel, Jean
Crusol, and their colleagues in the Department of Law and Economy at the
Université des Antilles et de la Guyane.
I then reworked a rough version of this manuscript in my new intellectual
home at the cuny Graduate Center, where I am now a member of the anthro-
pology PhD program and director of the Mellon Committee on Globalization
and Social Change. This has been an especially rich intellectual milieu that has
provided a space for the kind of transdisciplinary inquiry and collaborative
community that I’d only dreamt about. The gc has also allowed me to work
closely with inspiring doctoral students from whom I am constantly learning.
The journey to and through this book was also inflected by worldly de-
velopments. As the contours of my particular questions, object, and argu-
xii · Preface
ment became clearer to me, concerns that seemed to emerge from a personal
crucible, I realized that academic discussions about temporality, utopianism,
and potentialities were unfolding in all directions—and this at a moment of
converging “crises.” An apocalyptic sense of impending global catastrophe at
the intersection of financial, political, and ecological breakdown. On the left
a reluctance to name or envision the kind of world or life for which it is worth
struggling, even as popular and horizontal antiauthoritarian and anticapital-
ist movements surged worldwide. Intellectually, a sense that critical theory
may have reached certain impasses regarding how to think radical democracy
for these times partly by recuperating concepts such as freedom, autonomy,
and justice, and above all Marx’s human emancipation. It struck me that we
do not have a robust critical language with which to speak postnational de-
mocracy, translocal solidarity, and cosmopolitan politics in ways that have
not already been instrumentalized by human rights, humanitarianism, and
liberal internationalism.
In some way Freedom Time proceeds from the same basic point as my first
book, The French Imperial Nation-State. For twentieth-century African and
Antillean populations there did not exist a simple “outside” from which to
contest empire or pursue different futures, an outside that was not already
mediated by relations of colonial domination. In my first book this starting
point led to an analysis of the disabling antinomies of colonial racism and
the impossible situations that they created. Situations that Senghor, Césaire,
and their cohort negotiated and reflected upon. That same starting point has
now led me away from a critique of impossibility and toward a reflection on
utopian potentiality. It provides the basis for taking seriously Senghor’s and
Césaire’s attention to the transformative possibilities that may have been
sedimented within existing arrangements—as well as their hope, through
decolonization, to remake the world so that humanity could more fully real-
ize itself on a planetary scale. That starting point has provoked the concern
in this book with critical history as a dialogue with past and future and with
politics as practices oriented toward pasts present, not yet realized legacies,
and supposed impossibilities that may be already at hand.
This book feels overdue; I am past ready to abandon it. At the same time I
also feel like I might just now be ready to begin writing it.
Preface · xiii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Much of this book was written thanks to the Mellon Foundation’s shockingly
generous New Directions Fellowship. It owes singular debts to Laurent Du-
bois, who talked me through almost every step of this project and read care-
fully two versions of this manuscript; Fernando Coronil, thanks to whom I
am at the Graduate Center—his belief in my work was sustaining, and his
intellectual spirit inspiring; Susan Buck-Morss, a passionate and committed
thinker, with whom I have enjoyed the adventure of intellectual collabora-
tion; and Louise Lennihan, whose extraordinary efforts have made me at
home at the Graduate Center. Special thanks are due to Souleymane Bachir
Diagne, Jean Casimir, Mamadou Diouf, Michel Giraud, and Achille Mbembe,
specialists in the areas that I explore, whose encouragement and suggestions
made all the difference.
My thinking in this book has been incubated through dialogue with
dear friends and colleagues whose insights have been invaluable gifts: Dan
Birkholz, Yarimar Bonilla, Mayanthi Fernando, Jennifer Friedlander, Vinay
Gidwani, Manu Goswami, Philip Gourevitch, Henry Krips, Jeffrey Melnick,
Paul Saint-Amour, Marina Sitrin, Judith Surkis, Massimiliano Tomba, and
Matthew Trachman. It has benefited greatly from discussions with cuny
colleagues who humble me with their intelligence and generosity: notably
Anthony Alessandrini, Talal Asad, Herman Bennett, Claire Bishop, Kandice
Chuh, John Collins, Vincent Crapanzano, Gerald Creed, Duncan Faherty,
Sujatha Fernandes, David Harvey, Dagmar Herzog, Mandana Limbert, Mi-
chael Menser, Uday Singh Mehta, Julie Skurksi, and Neil Smith. Stellar doc-
toral students who commented on sections include Neil Agarwal, James Blair,
Lydia Brassard, Megan Brown, Ezgi Canpolat, Jill Cole, Jennifer Corby, Sam
Daly, Mark Drury, Melis Ece, Mohammed Ezzeldin, Timothy Johnson,
Ahilan Kadirgamar, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, Fiona Lee, Shea McManus,
Amiel Melnick, Junaid Mohammed, Andy Newman, Kareem Rabie, Jeremy
Rayner, Ahmed Sharif, Samuel Shearer, Chelsea Shields, and Frances Tran.
I had the good fortune to present various pieces to engaged audiences at
Columbia University, Cornell, cuny Graduate Center, Duke, Hanyang Uni-
versity (Korea), Harvard, Northwestern, the New School, nyu, Princeton,
the University of Chicago, University College, Cork (Ireland), the University
of Missouri (Columbia), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), Université
des Antilles et de la Guyane (Martinique), the University of Stirling (Scotland),
the University of Texas–Austin, Yale, and Wesleyan. For their invitations and
comments I am grateful to Nadia Abu El-Haj, Vanessa Agard-Jones, Mama-
dou Badiane, Ed Baring, Benjamin Brower, Kamari Clarke, Frederick Coo-
per, Michaeline Crichlow, Patrick Crowley, Michael Dash, Gregson Davis,
Brent Edwards, Charles Forsdick, Duana Fulwilley, Kaiama Glover, Brian
Goldstone, Julie Hardwick, Antony Hopkins, Abiola Irele, Stephen Jacob-
son, Deborah Jenson, Alice Kaplan, Sudipta Kaviraj, Trica Keaton, Ethan
Kleinberg, Yun Kyoung Kwon, Laurie Lambert, Brian Larkin, Mary Lewis,
Jie-Hyun Lim, Tessie Liu, Claudio Lomnitz, Anne-Maria Makhulu, Gregory
Mann, Bill Marshall, Joe Masco, Tracie Matysik, Alfred McCoy, Julia Mick-
enberg, Sam Moyn, David Murphy, Nick Nesbitt, Patricia Northover, Charlie
Piot, François Richard, Kristin Ross, Emmanuelle Saada, David Scott, Jer-
rold Segal, Charad Shari, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Ann Laura Stoler, Tyler
Stovall, Stephen Tyre, Aarthi Vaade, Frederic Viguier, Patricia Wald, and Jini
Kim Watson.
Much needed last-minute research assistance was offered by Jessie Fred-
lund, and heroic editorial work by Clare Fentress and Andrew Billingsley.
Thanks are due to Willa Armstrong, Elizabeth Ault, Amy Ruth Buchanan, Chris-
topher Robinson, Jessica Ryan, and Ken Wissoker at Duke University Press.
My deepest gratitude is reserved for Paula Gorlitz, for showing me the dif-
ference between a setback and a catastrophe; Arthur Wilder, my beacon for
how to be human; Rachel Lindheim, whose sharp insights, unflagging belief,
loving patience, and inspiring midcareer bravery nourished my writing; and
Isabel Wilder, whose boundless heart, vitality, and imagination compel me to
live in the present and believe in the future.
This book is about “the problem of freedom” after the end of empire.1 The title
refers not only to the postwar moment as a time for colonial freedom but to
the distinct types of time and peculiar political tenses required or enabled
by decolonization. Decolonization raised fundamental questions for subject
peoples about the frameworks within which self-determination could be
meaningfully pursued in relation to a given set of historical conditions. These
were entwined with overarching temporal questions about the relationship
between existing arrangements, possible futures, and historical legacies. The
year 1945 was a world-historical opening; the contours of the postwar order
were not yet fixed, and a range of solutions to the problem of colonial eman-
cipation were imagined and pursued.2 At the same time, the converging pres-
sures of anticolonial nationalism, European neocolonialism, American global-
ism, and UN internationalism made it appear to be a foregone conclusion that
the postwar world would be organized around territorial national states.
Freedom Time tells this story of opening and foreclosure through unrealized
attempts by French African and Antillean legislators and intellectuals during
the Fourth and Fifth Republics to invent forms of decolonization that would
secure self-determination without the need for state sovereignty. Central to
this account are Aimé Césaire from Martinique and Léopold Sédar Senghor
from Senegal who, between 1945 and 1960, served as public intellectuals,
party leaders, and deputies in the French National Assembly.3 Their proj-
ects proceeded from a belief that late imperialism had created conditions for
new types of transcontinental political association. They hoped to overcome
colonialism without falling into the trap of national autarchy. Their consti-
tutional initiatives were based on immanent critiques of colonialism and
republicanism, identifying elements within each that pointed beyond their
existing forms. They not only criticized colonialism from the standpoint of
constitutional democracy and self-government; they also criticized unitary
republicanism from the standpoint of decentralized, interdependent, plural,
and transnational features of imperialism itself.
In different ways Césaire and Senghor hoped to fashion a legal and po-
litical framework that would recognize the history of interdependence be-
tween metropolitan and overseas peoples and protect the latter’s economic
and political claims on a metropolitan society their resources and labor had
helped to create. Rather than allow France and its former colonies to be rei-
fied as independent entities in an external relationship to each other, the task
was to institutionalize a long-standing internal relationship that would persist
even after a legal separation. They were not simply demanding that overseas
peoples be fully integrated within the existing national state but proposing a
type of integration that would reconstitute France itself, by quietly exploding
the existing national state from within. Legal pluralism, disaggregated sover-
eignty, and territorial disjuncture would be constitutionally grounded. The
presumptive unity of culture, nationality, and citizenship would be ruptured.
Given these colonies’ entwined relationship with metropolitan society, de-
colonization would have to transform all of France, continental and over-
seas, into a different kind of political formation—specifically, a decentralized
democratic federation that would include former colonies as freely associated
member states. This would guarantee colonial emancipation and model an
alternative global order that would promote civilizational reconciliation and
human self-realization. At stake, for them, was the very future of the world.4
Refusing to accept the doxa that self-determination required state sover-
eignty, their interventions proceeded from the belief that colonial peoples
cannot presume to know a priori which political arrangements would best allow
them to pursue substantive freedom. Yet this pragmatic orientation was insep-
arable from a utopian commitment to political imagination and anticipatory
politics through which they hoped to transcend the very idea of France, re-
make the world, and inaugurate a new epoch of human history.5 Their proj-
ects were at once strategic and principled, gradualist and revolutionary, realist
and visionary, timely and untimely. They pursued the seemingly impossible
2 · chapter One
through small deliberate acts. As if alternative futures were already at hand,
they explored the fine line between actual and imagined, seeking to invent
sociopolitical forms that did not yet exist for a world that had not yet arrived,
although many of the necessary conditions and institutions were already pres-
ent. This proleptic orientation to political futurity was joined to a parallel
concern with historicity. They proclaimed themselves heirs to the legacies of
unrealized and seemingly outmoded emancipatory projects.
This book may be read in at least two ways. On one level, it is an intellec-
tual history of Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor between 1945 and 1960. As
such, it extends the account provided in my last book of the genesis of the Ne-
gritude project in the 1930s in relation to a new form of colonial governance
in French West Africa, the political rationality of postliberal republicanism,
and the development of a transnational black public sphere in imperial Paris.6
Freedom Time follows that story into the postwar period, when these student-
poets became poet-politicians participating directly in reshaping the contours
of Fourth and Fifth Republic France and pursuing innovative projects for
self-determination. On another level, it attempts to think through their work
about the processes and problems that defined their world and continue to
haunt ours. Their writings on African and Antillean decolonization may also
be read as reflections on the very prospect of democratic self-management,
social justice, and human emancipation; on the relationship between freedom
and time; and on the links between politics and aesthetics. They attempted to
transcend conventional oppositions between realism and utopianism, mate-
rialism and idealism, objectivity and subjectivity, positivism and rationalism,
singularity and universality, culture and humanity. The resulting conceptions
of poetic knowledge, concrete humanism, rooted universalism, and situated
cosmopolitanism now appear remarkably contemporary.7 Their insights, long
treated as outmoded, do not only speak to people interested in black critical
thought, anticolonialism, decolonization, and French Africa and the Antilles.
They also warrant the attention of those on the left now attempting to rethink
democracy, solidarity, and pluralism beyond the limitations of methodologi-
cal nationalism and the impasses of certain currents of postcolonial and post-
structural theory.
4 · chapter One
less important in dismantling Europe’s empires and creating the neocolonial
system that would succeed them.10
Histories that do not start with methodological nationalism can also focus
less on who may have helped or hindered programs for state sovereignty than
on the various ways that colonial actors confronted freedom as a problem
with no intrinsic solution. Public struggles over the shape of the postwar
world questioned the meanings of terms long treated as synonyms: freedom,
liberty, emancipation, independence, sovereignty, self-determination, and au-
tonomy. This study attends to the historical processes through which these
terms came to refer to one another. It does so by engaging seriously Césaire’s
and Senghor’s attempts to fashion political forms that were democratic, social-
ist, and intercontinental. This method fosters an appreciation of the novelty
of their attempts to envision new forms of cosmopolitanism, humanism,
universalism, and planetary reconciliation, forms that were concrete, rooted,
situated, and embodied in lived experiences and refracted through particular
but porous lifeworlds.
10 · chapter One
My argument pushes against a recent tendency in comparative history and
colonial studies to insist upon multiple, alternative, or countermodernities,
thus granting to Europe possession of a modernity which was always already
translocal. What is the analytic and political cost of assigning to Europe such
categories or experiences as self-determination, emancipation, equality, justice,
and freedom, let alone abstraction, humanity, or universality? Why confirm
the story that Europe has long told about itself? Modern, concrete univer-
salizing processes (like capitalism) were not confined to Europe. Nor were
concepts of universality (or concepts that became universal) simply imposed
by Europeans or imitated by non-Europeans. They were elaborated relation-
ally and assumed a range of meanings that crystallized concretely through use.
Moreover, African traditions of being and thinking entailed abstract ways of
conceptualizing humanity. All humanisms, after all, are rooted in concrete ways
of being, thinking, and worlding.
Chakrabarty recognizes that the intellectual heritage of Enlightenment
thought is now global and that he writes from within this inheritance. He con-
cludes with an eloquent reminder that “provincializing Europe cannot ever be
a project of shunning European thought. For at the end of European imperial-
ism, European thought is a gift to us all. We can talk of provincializing it only
in an anticolonial spirit of gratitude.”26 So clearly he is not himself a provincial
or nativist thinker. Yet this conception of gratitude concedes too much at the
outset—to Europe as wealthy benefactor and to a liberal conception of pri-
vate property. For if modernity was a global process its concepts are a com-
mon legacy that already belong to all humanity; they are not Europe’s to give.
They are the product of what Susan Buck-Morss has recently called “universal
history,” the “gift of the past,” and “communism of the idea.”27
In short, Césaire’s and Senghor’s postwar work invites us to deterritorialize
social thought and to decolonize intellectual history. This is not matter of valo-
rizing non-European forms of knowledge but of questioning the presumptive
boundaries of “France” or “Europe” themselves—by recognizing the larger
scales on which modern social thought was forged and appreciating that co-
lonial societies produced self-reflexive thinkers concerned with large-scale
processes and future prospects. The point is not simply that Césaire and Sen-
ghor were also interested in humanism, cosmopolitanism, and universalism.
More significantly, they attempted to reclaim, rethink, and refunction these
categories by overcoming the abstract registers in which they were convention-
ally formulated and attempted to realize them through intercontinental po-
litical formations.
Historical Constellations
In thinking with Césaire and Senghor about modern categories as universal
property, I have found especially useful the concept of “constellations” devel-
oped by Walter Benjamin and later taken up by Theodor Adorno.29 For them,
thinking entailed arranging concrete objects of inquiry into particular con-
stellations through which the elements, the whole, and the hidden relations
among them may be illuminated. They sought to grasp the dialectical char-
acter of historically specific truths that are constructed yet revealed, present
within objects yet mediated by subjective reason, nonintentional yet disclosed
by critical reflection. Especially important was their idea that constellations
are actually existing arrangements that must, nevertheless, be arranged. For
these peculiar entities to illuminate problems, they must be simultaneously ob-
jective and subjective. It is only after they have been created by a critical imag-
ination that the creator can discover and recognize as real the relations he or
she crafted by thinking together seemingly disparate ideas, places, peoples.
Freedom Time attempts to discover and construct constellations through
which to explore non-self-evident connections across conventional geograph-
ical boundaries and historical epochs. These include those linking Césaire,
Senghor, Benjamin, Bloch, Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, and John
Dewey; Marx’s human emancipation, Proudhon’s mutualism, and Senghor’s
and Césaire’s federalism; Césaire’s postwar program for abolition through
Unthinking France, Rethinking Decolonization · 13
integration, Victor Schoelcher’s utopian vision of slave abolition in 1848, and
Toussaint Louverture’s 1801 attempt to create a constitutional federation with
imperial France; Senghor’s redemptive solidarity, Emmanuel Levinas’s and
Jacques Derrida’s commitment to hospitality, and contemporary efforts to in-
stitute cosmopolitan law and global democracy.
Césaire and Senghor were especially attentive to the complex relationship
between politics and time. They explored separately how inherited legacies
may animate current initiatives and how present acts may liberate the not yet
realized potential sedimented within reified objects. Alternatively they were
each concerned with the proleptic character of politics, which sought to call
forth nonexistent worlds by acting as if an unimaginable future were at hand.
Their sensitivity to the politics of time and the temporality of politics calls at-
tention to the marvelous but real relations that often implicate disparate times,
places, peoples, and ideas in one another, relations that historians should at-
tend to directly.
Although Freedom Time focuses primarily on the postwar opening, it also
attempts to trace a constellation between that period and earlier moments of
epochal transition when self-determination and colonial emancipation became
public problems (i.e., the 1790s and 1840s) and likewise between the post-
war opening and our contemporary conjuncture. My examination of Senghor’s
and Césaire’s programs for decolonization thus moves backward and forward
from the postwar fulcrum, analyzing their self-conscious relationship to pre-
decessors who also believed nonnational colonial emancipation might create
conditions for real self-determination. These included Schoelcher and Louver-
ture, as well as Marx and Proudhon. But this study also looks forward from
the postwar period to a future that Césaire and Senghor anticipated, one we
now inhabit and are still seeking to construct from within what Jürgen Haber-
mas has called the “postnational constellation.”30
Structural transformations have unmade the postwar order that decolo-
nization created and against which Césaire and Senghor sought alternative
arrangements. These shifts make their works newly legible and politically
resonant insofar as they anticipated and addressed many of the conceptual and
empirical predicaments that democracy in an age of globality must now con-
front. Our political present is characterized by issues and proposals that cir-
culated in the immediate postwar period—autonomy, self-management, legal
pluralism, cultural multiplicity, disaggregated sovereignty, and federalism.
Césaire’s and Senghor’s political initiatives thus speak to current movements
among Francophone Africans and Antilleans to reimagine and renegotiate their
14 · chapter One
relationship to France, the European Union, and the international community.
They also resonate with efforts today by scholars, activists, and international
lawyers to fashion new frameworks for postnational democracy, cosmopoli-
tan law, and planetary politics.
This study, which, despite its length, I regard as an essay, is also meant to
be an inquiry into the politics of time, paying special attention to how a given
historical epoch may not be identical with itself and historical tenses may blur
and interpenetrate.31 And it examines the untimely ways that people act as if
they exist or can address a historical epoch that is not their own, whether stra-
tegically or unconsciously. Such connections can be grasped only abstractly;
they cannot be indicated or documented in traditional empirical fashion. To
tack between past and present thus requires a certain movement between
empirical and abstract levels of analysis. Identifying and fashioning “historical
constellations” is one way of writing a “history of the present” that is related
to but distinct from the more familiar strategy of producing genealogies. Free-
dom Time thus works simultaneously to elaborate contexts, trace lines of de-
scent, and construct constellations.
A crucial precedent and reference point for this study is anthropologist David
Scott’s important book Conscripts of Modernity, which powerfully challenges
the nationalist orthodoxies of anticolonial thinking and demands that schol-
ars attend directly to historical temporality as an analytic and political prob-
lem. Scott contends that “morally and politically what ought to be at stake in
historical inquiry is a critical appraisal of the present itself, not the mere re-
construction of the past.”32 Regarding the unexamined persistence of certain
anticolonial research questions that were once formulated by C. L. R. James
for a now unavailable future, he offers a warning for scholars today: “the task
before us is not one of merely finding better answers . . . to existing ques-
tions—as though [they] were timeless ones” but of reflecting on “whether the
questions we have been asking the past to answer continue to be questions
worth having answers to.”33 Freedom Time accepts this urgent invitation to re-
think history—including our stories about colonialism and our methods for
approaching the past—in relation to the demands of our political present.
In the following chapters I develop a different understanding of the pro-
vocative notion of “futures past” that Scott adapts from the historian Reinhart
Kosellek.34 For Scott, revolutionary anticolonialism’s dream of national sov-
ereignty became a historically superseded and politically obsolete future past
after failing to secure political freedom for colonized peoples and can no lon-
ger meaningfully animate emancipatory projects in our radically transformed
16 · chapter One
NOTES