Freedom Time
Tuesday, 30 June 2015 - 5:30pm
WiSER, JWTC and CISA invite you to the launch of
Gary Wilder’s new book
“Freedom Time”
Introduction by Sharad Chari and response by Achille Mbembe
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, 30th June
5:30pm
5:30pm
WiSER Seminar Room
6th Floor, Richard Ward Building
East Campus, Wits University
Copies of the book will be sold (CASH ONLY) for R245 on the night.
6th Floor, Richard Ward Building
East Campus, Wits University
Copies of the book will be sold (CASH ONLY) for R245 on the night.
Drinks and snacks will be served
The launch forms part of the JWTC workshop on Bios, Techne and the Manufacture of Happiness which includes a series of high profile public events http://jwtc.org.za/the_workshop/programme_2015/full_programme.htm
The launch forms part of the JWTC workshop on Bios, Techne and the Manufacture of Happiness which includes a series of high profile public events http://jwtc.org.za/the_workshop/programme_2015/full_programme.htm
WISER Research Theme: