SCAN CONTEMPORARY ART JOURNAL Editor’s Note for SCAN Issue 3 This issue of SCAN explores the possibility but also interact with art. Thus one of the of reconfiguring the past, present, and future. most common ways that contemporary artists We think it is integral to art practice. Two and viewers navigate the art work: art history. notions that significantly impact this question The discipline requires that we lean heaviest that implicates a certain exchange between on citation, thematic elements and medium- art and world are distance and experience. specific questions. All at the expense of Critical distance has often been regarded as the experience. The encounter with the artwork is important construct for critique. But the case a far more challenging endeavor. Far broader against critical distance as the standard bearer considerations are required to unpack its of critique a panacea has been mounting for content. We viewers find our way into the work some decades. The strongest contemporary by virtue of our practical experiences with accounts against maintaining critical distance the outside world. This expanded notion of hinge upon identity. Issues of gender, race the art encounter bridges space, and because and sexuality reimagine the past, present and darting between past and present, offers up an future precisely by substituting distance for alternative future. proximity, embodiment or identification. In this sense critical distance imposes Sarah Blanchard and Danielle Fenn constraints not only on how we produce art 1 SCAN ISSUE 3 BY COLAB SCAN CONTEMPORARY ART JOURNAL that sought to address their dire diagnosis: that national Gary Wilder’s new Indigenous Sovereignty decolonization was bound to give birth to neocolonialism. book Freedom Time: After all, the colonies-turned-nation-states have been Negritude, Decolonization, living in the neocolonial shadow of decolonization for and the Future of the and the over half a century in a world where state sovereignty World. continues to be celebrated as though it were a law of nature, serving as the foundation for entities such as the United Nations (premised on territorial sovereignty), such global Future of the World movements as human rights (premised on citizenship rights) and Indigenous rights (premised on settler state sovereignty), such fields as international law (premised on by Someone Here non-binding agreements between sovereign states), and such feigned federalisms as the European Union (premised on bankocracy and border militarization), to say nothing of the WTO, IMF, OECD, or the World Bank.1 Gary Wilder’s new book Freedom conversation and political project of antidote to this allergic reaction, In his concluding chapter, Wilder takes some time to Time: Negritude, Decolonization, francophone African intellectuals in Wilder urges us to take their poetic reflect on the freedom time of these thinkers as it relates to and the Future of the World is 1930’s Paris known as Négritude from and political visions of postnational our own time: “[Césaire] and Senghor’s visions of self- a wake-up call concerning the a longstanding critique that effectively democracy for what they really were: determination without state sovereignty, legacies that history of postnational democratic came to reduce the movement to an serious and significant attempts to they inherited and willed, should surely count as a fecund imagination. As he writes in the ultimately essentialist project carried imagine a form of decolonization that source for an effective history of our present throughout opening line of chapter one, “this out by a nativist and assimilated would transcend the assumed end- which to glimpse a possible future” (251). He then goes book is about ‘the problem of cultural elite opposed to national goal of state sovereignty at a particular on to write: “But we can only begin to recognize their freedom’ after the end of empire” decolonization. Or so the critique moment in history when the futures past, let alone hear their transgenerational call (1). As Wilder argues repeatedly goes. geopolitical landscape of imperialism to possible heirs, if we unthink entrenched assumptions throughout the book, the problem of had come to create an intercontinental about Négritude as a nativism, decolonization as national freedom during the post-war period Wilder is crystal clear on numerous climate of global interdependence. independence, and the post-war period as the Cold War of decolonization (1945–1960) is occasions that he is not making order that came to be rather than an opening in which how to of think self-determination an argument against the national The historical significance and a range of non-national political experiments were without state sovereignty; how to decolonization movements of the possible necessity of post-war national envisioned and enacted” (257). think of decolonization without post-war period. Nor is he making an decolonization notwithstanding, national independence; how to think argument that the political projects Césaire and Senghor’s claim that Just as Césaire and Senghor saw their own attempts to of popular sovereignty without put forth by Césaire and Senghor as colonial emancipation would never think colonial emancipation without state sovereignty as territorial sovereignty. As Wilder an alternative form of decolonization bring about genuine postcolonial inherited by past attempts to do the same in figures such makes clear, these are all different were necessarily the right ones. freedom so long as it remained as Toussaint Louverture and Victor Schoelcher, Wilder versions of the same question: how Instead, Wilder is concerned with premised on the principle of state concludes with the suggestion that we might listen to to think of a world order that is both those wholesale dismissals and sovereignty remains all too relevant the “pasts present” and “futures past” of these thinkers postcolonial and postnational? denunciations of Césaire and Senghor to our own historical moment. As in order to rethink our own post-Cold War present not as conservative apologists of empire Wilder emphasizes, admitting that as the neocolonial order that came to be but rather as He powerfully and persuasively engaging in compromises with the utopian political vision and a historical opening in its own right, in which a range argues that the importance of this the colonizer under the disguise of pragmatic political policies of these of non-national political experiments continue to be question, along with what were decolonization. As Wilder explains thinkers may not have been the right envisioned and enacted, and where the political stakes of significant attempts to answer it, can in a recent panel discussion, his (nor the only) solution to the concrete these experiments continue to be, as they were for Césaire be found in the lives and works of the argument is one set up against “the conditions and contradictions of and Senghor, nothing other than the “future of the world.” two poet politicians Aimé Césaire allergic reaction that anything that their time (or their place) does not Wilder then provides a brief survey of some of these and Léopold Sédar Senghor. To do isn’t revolutionary nationalism mean that they were necessarily current non-national political experiments, and how we so, Wilder retrieves the cultural is necessarily reactionary.” As an wrong in presenting a political form might understand their relationship to a longer history of 2 3 SCAN ISSUE 3 BY COLAB SCAN CONTEMPORARY ART JOURNAL imagining postnational decolonization political projects of non-national resurgence does not mean the since truly recognizing the latter would mean radically in place of empire, and how we might bring such a world inherited from such figures as Césaire decolonization required radically resurgence of Indigenous nationhood reconfiguring the former. For settlers, this would mean into being. I am here again reminded of Leanne Simpson’s and Senghor. reconstituting France itself, citing (it certainly does), but that Indigenous fundamentally rethinking our relationship to a “Canada” words: countless formulations in which resurgence certainly does not mean that continues to demand our unflinching and unthinking Wilder’s survey is certainly not Césaire and Senghor declare that the the resurgence of new Westphalian support to ensure that its state sovereignty is not revealed I am not so concerned with how we dismantle the master’s intended to be a comprehensive list object of decolonization cannot be nation-states all across Turtle in all its illegitimacy. I am reminded here of George house…but I am very concerned with how we (re)build our nor a detailed description of all the restricted or reduced to the colonies, Island. In the words of Anishinaabe Manuel’s words from The Fourth World, that “Real own house, or our own houses. I have spent enough time individual thinkers and collective but in fact requires the decolonization writer Leanne Simpson: “I am not recognition of our [Indigenous] presence and humanity taking down the master’s house and now I want most of movements currently aspiring to or the “explosion” of the very a nation-state, nor do I strive to be would require a genuine reconsideration of so many my energy to go into visioning and building our new home. some form of postnational democracy. category of “France.” As Wilder notes one.” Countless other Indigenous people’s role in North American society that it would (32) Nevertheless, there is a particular in a recent interview, this book is not feminist scholars and writers – Audra amount to a genuine leap of imagination” (216-217). absence from the list that I believe so much about rethinking France as Simpson, Sarah Hunt, Mishuana This is perhaps the difference between a project of needs to be highlighted, if only it is about unthinking France. In this Goeman, Patricia Monture-Angus, Another central claim in Wilder’s book is that Césaire decolonization that tells us what to knock down and a to further Wilder’s argument by sense, Césaire and Senghor’s (and Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Eve Tuck, and Senghor were at their core planetary thinkers.