L'œuvre de Gary Wilder explore les complexités de l'état-nation impérial français, examinant les concepts entrelacés de Négritude et d'humanisme colonial entre les deux guerres mondiales. Son écriture offre un examen critique de la manière dont les identités nationales étaient construites dans les cadres coloniaux. La perspective anthropologique de Wilder fournit des aperçus profonds des courants intellectuels qui ont façonné les colonisateurs comme les colonisés. Son érudition est reconnue pour son analyse rigoureuse et son exploration réfléchie des dynamiques de pouvoir historiques.
Through a critique of Left realism, culturalism, and pessimism from the standpoint of heterodox Marxism and Black radicalism, Gary Wilder insists that we place questions of solidarity and temporality at the center of Left political thinking. He makes a bold case for embracing a concrete utopian politics of the possible-impossible adequate to current planetary crises.
Providing a reading of Aime Cesaire and Leopold Senghor as political thinkers, Gary Wilder explains how these eminent anti-colonial thinkers, poets and political leaders sought to remake France by advocating for colonial self- determination and fuller racial and cultural integration within the French empire.
France experienced a period of crisis following World War I when the relationship between the nation and its colonies became a subject of fierce public debate. This book focuses on two intersecting movements that redefined imperial politics - colonial humanism, led by administrative reformers in West Africa, and the Paris-based Negritude project.