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HUMANISM AND THE ENDS OF EMPIRE, 1945–1960

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 October 2017

GILI KLIGER
GILI KLIGER*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Harvard University E-mail: kliger@g.harvard.edu
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Abstract

This article situates francophone anticolonial thinkers—including Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Frantz Fanon—within the “humanism debate” in postwar French thought. Drawing on their poetry, prose, speeches, and interviews, this article reconstructs their critique of the humanist tradition that had identified the capacity for reason as the essence of “man.” It then traces their dialogue with approaches to this critique, including existentialism, phenomenology, and surrealism, that circulated in the metropole. The particular ways in which anticolonial thinkers built upon such approaches merit our attention because they force us to revise our understanding of the politics motivating the turn to so-called “antihumanism” in the 1960s. Drawing on recent studies that have highlighted proposals for federalist alternatives to empire entertained prior to national independence, this article suggests that the “federalist imagination” helped to inspire the distinctive mode of criticism developed by certain anticolonial thinkers and taken up by later scholars.

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Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , November 2018 , pp. 773 - 800
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

* I would like to thank Peter E. Gordon, Samuel Moyn, and the anonymous reviewers and editorial team at Modern Intellectual History for their helpful comments and guidance on earlier drafts of this article.

References

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27 Leiner, “Entretien avec Aimé Césaire,” xiv, original emphasis.

28 Ibid., x; xiii, original emphasis.

29 Césaire, Return, 35.

30 Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Les leçons de Leo Frobenius,” in Senghor, Liberté III, 398–404, at 399.

31 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 235.

32 Césaire, Discourse, 37.

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34 Senghor, “Les Leçons de Leo Frobenius,” 399.

35 Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Qu'est-ce que la Négritude?”, in Senghor, Liberté III, 90–101, at 92, original emphasis.

36 Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Négritude et Germanité I,” in Senghor, Liberté III, 11–17.

37 Adell, Sandra, “Reading/Writing Négritude: Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire,” in Adell, Double-Consciousness/Double Bind: Theoretical Issues in Twentieth-Century Black Literature (Urbana and Chicago, 1994), 29–55Google Scholar, at 33, original emphasis.

38 Senghor, “Négritude et Modernité,” 234.

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42 Ibid., 243.

43 Césaire, Return, 37. Arnold argues that “this passage, which is central to Négritude as a concept, is . . . a paraphrase of Frobenius,” the German ethnologist who carried out studies of “Ethiopian” civilization in Germany's African colonies. See Arnold, A. J., “Beyond Postcolonial Césaire: Reading Cahier d'un retour au pays natal Historically,” Forum for Modern Language Studies, 44/3 (2008), 258–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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48 Ibid., 83.

49 Jacqueline Leiner, “Entretien avec Aimé Césaire,” cited in Robin D. G. Kelley, “A Poetics of Anticolonialism,” in Césaire, Discourse, 7–28, at 17.

50 Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Introduction,” in Senghor, Liberté I, 7–9, at 8–9, original emphasis.

51 Césaire, Return, 45.

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55 See Macey, Frantz Fanon, 161.

56 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 65; Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 68.

57 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 12, 42; Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 23, 48.

58 Arnold, “Beyond Postcolonial Césaire,” 264.

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61 Césaire, Discourse, 33.

62 Senghor, “De la liberté de l’âme,” 101.

63 Césaire, Return, 37.

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69 Ibid., 78.

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72 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 112; Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 108.

73 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 114; Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 109.

74 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 206; Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 187.

75 See David Macey, Frantz Fanon, 152–97, esp. 166-7.

76 Fanon quotes the following from Jaspers, “There exists among men, because they are men, a solidarity through which each shares responsibility for every injustice and every wrong committed in the world . . . if I have not risked my life in order to prevent the murder of other men, if I have stood silent, I feel guilty.” in Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 68 n. 9; Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 71–2 n. 9.

77 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 69; Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 71.

78 Cited in Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 187–8, my emphasis.

79 Ibid, 188.

80 Césaire, Discourse, 73.

81 Depestre, “An Interview with Aimé Césaire,” 85.

82 Césaire, Aimé, Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai: Entretiens avec Françoise Vergès (Paris, 2005), 69Google Scholar.

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84 Césaire, Discourse, 52.

85 Césaire, “Letter to Maurice Thorez,” 152.

86 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 28; Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 36.

87 Hiddleston, Jane, “Aimé Césaire and Postcolonial Humanism,” The Modern Language Review 105 (2010), 87–102Google Scholar (99).

88 Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Le problème de la culture,” in Senghor, Liberté I, 93–7, at 96, original emphasis.

89 Senghor, “De la liberté de l’âme,” 102, original emphasis.

90 Senghor, “Le problème de la culture,” 97.

91 Wilder, Freedom Time, 70.

92 See Etherington, “An Answer to the Question: What is Decolonization?”.

93 Césaire, Return, 26–7. Recall the famous passage in Nietzsche's “On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life,” where he notes, the “cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today.” Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, 1997), 57–124, at 60.

94 Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 9.

95 Léopold Sédar Senghor, “La francophonie comme culture,” in Senghor, Liberté III, 80–89, at 81.

96 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 50.

97 Ibid., 1.

98 Ibid., 236.

99 Ibid., 144. See Hiddleston, Jane, “Fanon, Nationalism, and Humanism: The Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Intellectual,” Irish Journal of French Studies 10 (2010), 115–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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102 Ibid., 118.

103 Ibid., 125, original emphasis.

104 Ibid., 116.

105 Ibid., 134, original emphasis.

106 Ibid.

107 Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War,” 245, my italics.

108 Ibid., 241.

109 See Peter E. Gordon, “Hammer without a Master: French Phenomenology and the Origins of Deconstruction (or, How Derrida read Heidegger),” in Bevir, Mark, Hargis, Jill, and Rushing, Sara, eds., Histories of Postmodernism (New York, 2007), 103–30.Google Scholar

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111 Ibid., 63.

112 The case has also been made for postcolonial readings of Senghor and Césaire. As Souleymane Bachir Diagne writes of Senghor, “underneath what we may call [his] ‘strategic essentialism’ the discourse of hybridity is always at work, rendering fluid the identities on display.” Or as Françoise Vergès writes of Césaire, “He retraces the profound inequality that structures European discourse, even when it wishes to be universal; he interrogates the foundational violence that constitutes colonization and places the colonial fact at the heart of Europe and not at its periphery. In that respect, Césaire is a postcolonial writer.” See Diagne, African Art as Philosophy, 15; Françoise Vergès, “Pour une lecture postcoloniale de Césaire,” in Césaire, Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai: Entretiens avec Françoise Vergès, 71–136, at 94.

113 Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, 162.

114 Macey, Frantz Fanon, 203.

115 Gary Wilder writes, “Current efforts to envision postnational democracy are the unwitting heirs of postwar attempts to invent forms of self-determination without state sovereignty.” See Wilder, Freedom Time, 256.

116 Nancy, Jean-Luc, Being Singular Plural, trans. Richardson, Robert D. and O'Byrne, Anne E. (Stanford, 2000), 36.Google Scholar

117 Senghor, “De la liberté de l’âme,” 99.