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Wilder, Gary. Freedom Time, Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World.


I- Unthinking time, Rethinking decolonization

Book is about the question of freedom after the end of empire.
Postwar moment as a time for colonial freedom and types of time and political
tenses required or enabled by decolonization.

Seemed given the nature of time, that the postwar would not be organized
around nation states.

I am interested in ways in which French and Antillean scholars imagined

decolonization without state sovereignty. Senghor and Cesaire for ex believed
-col had created new types of transcontinental political associations that
did not necessarily believe in national autarchy.
Their anticolonialism and antirepublicanism:
1-constitutional democracy and self government
2-decentralized, interdependent, plural, and
transnational features of imperialism

They hoped for a legal and political system that

would recognize the interdependence between
metropolitan and overseas people and protect the
latters economic and political claims on a
metropolitan society their resources and labor
helped to create.

A-Decolonization beyond Methodological Nationalism

-to presuppose that national independence is the necessary form of colonial
emancipation is to mistake a product of decolonization for an optic through
which to study it.

-Maybe, decolonization has been the hasty abandonment of peoples ratherthan

their liberation, if one thinks that colonized peoples were, in reality, members of
political systems
B-Unthinking France, Working through Empire
My first book looked at the ways in which the colonial system transformed
france into new plural polities, with multiple cultural formation a, adiministrative
regimes, and legal systems. Freedom Time, how French imperialism created
conditions of an alternative federal democracy that might have been.

This endeavor compels us to unthink a series of assumptions about the territorial

anaional paradigm concerning the isomorphism among territory, people, and
state; the symmetry between nationality and citizenship; the national state as a
unitary juridical and administrative space; or the scale and composition of
political terrains, public spheres, discursive communities, and intellectual fields.

Senghor and Cesaire did not accept the general understanding of France as a
European sphere. They rather assumed that it was essentially diverse. They were
not alienated, people needed to change their wrong understandings of the
French state. That is why, instead of calling for autartic nations they claimed
federalism. Without this, their radically literatlist approach to decolonization
cannot be fully grasped.

C-Deterritorializing Social thought

D-Thinking With: Intellectual History as a Critical Theory