Loading...
Freedom as Marronage, by Neil Roberts; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015, 254 pp., $29.00 (softcover), ISBN-13: 978-0226201047.
Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World, by Gary Wilder; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015, 384 pp., $28.95 (softcover), ISBN-13: 978-0822358503.
The idea of freedom is at once obvious and elusive. Slavery may be freedom’s opposite, but release from slavery has often resulted in something rather less satisfying than fantasies of freedom would promise. Freedom is also promised at colonialism’s end and at the end of military occupation, but this freedom, too, is deeply equivocal. Yet the struggle for freedom still seems noble and just. Are we to conclude that it is the rhetoric of freedom that is so compelling? Political theorist Neil Roberts and historical anthropologist Gary Wilder, both drawing on Caribbean sources, argue that there is more to freedom than mere rhetoric, though they reach quite different conclusions about what freedom means.
Roberts begins with and embraces the intuition that freedom and slavery are opposites. This opposition has attracted significant interest in political theory circles recently. It means that governments intent on protecting freedom can create laws meant to protect citizens from slavery (or, more broadly, domination); in contrast, classical liberalism labels as free the space where the state cannot intervene, most notably, private life. While Roberts is sympathetic with those who would place opposition to slavery and domination at the center of their political theory, he suspects that such accounts are patronizing. Slavery and freedom may be opposites, but that does not mean that those enslaved are unfree. Indeed, he compellingly argues that the greatest insights into freedom are to be gained from those who have the most experience with slavery. To be enslaved does not mean passively accepting slavery; it means understanding the horrors of slavery and struggling, in ways small and large, against slavery.
Maroons are paradigmatic figures of resistance to slavery, and Roberts takes them as paradigms of freedom. He is careful, however, to identify the maroon spirit, marronage, with freedom rather than specific maroon communities. Roberts finds marronage expressed in the writings of key figures of the Black (especially American) intellectual tradition, from Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis. He also finds it expressed in acts of resistance of enslaved people, with a particular focus on maroon communities in the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean. Roberts recounts how Toussaint L’Ouverture brought together maroon communities, but he united them under his leadership, replacing the fugitive spirit of the maroon with allegiance to a new sovereign. After considering the limitations of specific acts of marronage, Roberts lists attributes of the pure spirit of marronage: it is not total escape but rather lines of flight in the interstices of political systems; it opposes gender hierarchy; it embraces spirituality; it creatively re-appropriates the conceptual tools at hand. In the writings of Édouard Glissant and in the practice of contemporary Rastafarians, Roberts finds exemplary instances of such marronage.
While Roberts’s narrative is appealing, his method raises a significant worry. Raymond Geuss and, a generation earlier, Gillian Rose diagnose a neo-Kantian impulse that has captured contemporary political theory. In brief, the political theorist begins with intuitions about certain empirical examples, attempts to express them with a concept that is then refined and elevated into the transcendental register, and finally that concept is put forward as the necessary starting point for all political inquiry. Think: John Rawls’s theory of justice. The problem is that such a method—the method that Roberts uses in his study—oversimplifies politics, intellectualizes politics, and ultimately conceals politics. As much as we might like justice, or marronage, in their pure, ivory tower distillations, it is not clear how the work of applying such concepts to political realities speaks to the challenges of negotiating interests, power, and ideology and mobilizing constituencies that are the work of political actors and social movements. At best, such conceptual work can fuel the imagination, allowing us to see political realities in a new light. But why not defer to the vivid imaginations of those deeply engaged in the actual work of politics, amplifying their voices and acknowledging that professional intellectuals are not the only people who can do intellectual work?
This is the path Gary Wilder takes: Hegelian rather than neo-Kantian. He tells a finely textured story spotlighting the effervescent political imagination of post-War French intellectuals engaged in anti-colonial struggle. The take-away from Wilder’s work is the same as the take-away from Roberts’s: a new understanding of freedom, drawing particularly on Caribbean sources. Wilder develops this account of freedom by carefully tracking the unfolding of history, cognizant of and occasionally in explicit dialogue with the resources of critical theory but leaving the thoughts and words of his protagonists, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, at the center of his narrative.
In one sense, Wilder simply offers a revisionist historical narrative of Negritude. The standard narrative is one of decline: Black intellectuals in France between the world wars produced brilliant literature that made blackness beautiful. After the Second World War, these intellectuals became professional politicians who remained uncomfortably close to their colonial overlords. A younger generation of nationalists and revolutionaries soon overtook the Negritude leaders, demanding complete independence. Wilder successfully complicates this story. He shows how Césaire and Senghor demanded something more radical than political independence: they demanded that metropolitan France subordinate itself to the colonies. More precisely, Césaire and Senghor imagined, and sought to implement, a political relationship between France and the French colonies that resisted the nation-state model by putting France and the colonies on exactly equal footing with each other in a loose confederation, with the resources of metropolitan France effectively redistributed. The possibility for such an arrangement was opened by crises: the end of the Second World War and the return of Charles de Gaulle in 1958. But the powerful decolonial imagination of Césaire and Senghor, expressed in their literature as well as their politics, was never implemented; the moment when it was plausible passed. Wilder agrees with the conventional wisdom of the left that, by the end of their lives, Césaire and Senghor were rather pathetic figures, stuck in an uncreative, repetitive defense. They were, eventually, flanked from their left by revolutionary nationalists, but while these younger activists totally rejected France, they embraced the form of the nationstate, tragically ensuring neocolonial servitude.
Particularly in the case of Césaire, Wilder does an exemplary job of not only reconstructing the Martinican’s views but also his relationship to the past. A chapter explores Césaire’s critical engagement with the 19th-century French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher, and another discusses Césaire’s engagement with Toussaint. Wilder contrasts Césaire’s Toussaint with the depiction of Toussaint by C. L. R. James (on whose work Roberts relies), showing how Césaire brings out Toussaint’s carefully calculated responses to changing political circumstances. Césaire’s Toussaint is committed both to the people of Saint-Domingue and to France; when these two loyalties cannot be held together his life’s drama becomes a tragedy and he sacrifices himself—thereby achieving Black freedom. Toussaint had hoped to transform colonial domination into a partnership between France and Saint-Domingue, but France would have none of it; the same fate befell Césaire himself when he attempted the same.
Wilder’s theoretical intervention in Freedom Time is in conversations about temporality and politics. He identifies a moment, in the mid-20th century, when untimely ideas, ideas that at any other moment would seem hopelessly utopian, gained currency. The majority of Martinique’s population supported Césaire’s vision of a de-centered, de-nationalized France, and it looked for a moment as if metropolitan France might be supportive as well. Wilder demonstrates that it was actually Césaire and Senghor’s careful attention to history and to their contemporary political landscape, and their willingness to pragmatically maneuver in that landscape, that elevated their vision from utopian literary speculation to political possibility. Wilder directly criticizes Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida for ignoring the need to fuse “impossible” visions of justice with worldly political engagement. The titular “freedom time” interrupts and has the potential to radically liberate, but its prerequisite is the attention to detail possessed by a writer—of literature and of history.
The similarities that Wilder identifies between Senghor and Césaire are compelling, but the comparison raises many questions that go unanswered. Vietnam and Algeria loom in the background: why are their trajectories so different from those of Senegal and Martinique? The glaring but largely unaddressed connection between Senghor and Césaire is race, blackness. Wilder reads Negritude as fundamentally about colonial domination, but what would it mean to read Negritude as equally or even more about anti-blackness? Wilder positions the sovereign nation-state as the enemy, to be superseded, but might it also be argued that France’s implicit identification with whiteness was at issue? Similarly, Roberts’s development of marronage draws heavily on the tradition of Black critical theory but rarely addresses race head-on. In Roberts’s case this may be a methodological necessity: as it enters the realm of theory marronage is stripped of its culturally specific features.
One way of putting the most pressing question that goes unaddressed by both Roberts and Wilder is whether Caribbean freedom is the same as Black freedom. Both authors reject anodyne portrayals of the Caribbean as a melting pot, and both move beyond unreflective accounts of freedom as freedom-from-colonialism. Yet neither sounds the depths of anti-blackness or thoroughly conjugates racial and colonial violence. If freedom is to be more than rhetoric, its antonyms must be multiple.
