Chapter 6 examines multiracial internationalism as conceptualized by the International Union of Métis (IUM), its founder Nicolas Rigonaux, and a global network of allies in Europe, French Africa, and elsewhere in the 1950s. These were twilight years of French colonial rule. The IUM’s dual pillars of mobilization and collective action focused on childhood and citizenship, in alignment with what métis organizations in Africa had long supported. Yet the meanings and claims ascribed to these concepts changed between 1957 and 1960. Multiracial internationalists struggled against racism and racial oppression, whether perpetuated by “blacks,” “whites,” or “others.” The shared identity of birth from a white and “other” parent constituted a distinct form of transnational kinship, which could build bridges to international peace and the realization of universal human rights. Multiracial people were kin whose transnational citizenship entailed civic, social, and humanitarian action for the prosperity of African and other subjugated societies. The multiracial subject would guide African societies to a new relationship with France, healing the racial trauma of colonialism and helping develop African societies, thus fostering a mutually beneficial future.

The Introduction situates the book’s themes in three different debates. First, it situates the question of Senegal’s decolonization in a debate about non-national futures as they were imagined by Negritude and Pan-African thinkers at the time of decolonization. Although these non-national futures have now become unthinkable, this book demonstrates that they are remembered as futures past in Senegal’s colonial heritage sites. Second, it situates the interpretation of Senegal’s cultural heritage in a debate about the legacy of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Negritude. Senegal’s politics of heritagization are indebted to the Negritude philosophy of Senegal’s first president, whose politics of heritage were aimed at the reclamation of African dignity and respect, promising liberation through recuperation. Hence, this book situates the reclamation of African heritage in a temporality of return and frames cultural heritage as a technique of repair. Third, it situates the reclamation of African heritage in debates about world heritage, arguing that Senghor’s archiving project and support for UNESCO’s World Heritage List constituted parallel heritage projects pointing towards the decolonization of world heritage. The book posits that decolonization as envisioned by UNESCO and Senghor is a project to repair the traumas of modernity.

During the decolonization era in the Caribbean, writers from throughout the region shaped visions of nationalism and anticolonialism through engaging with francophone Caribbean history and culture. Haiti in particular played a major symbolic role. Looking back to the Haitian Revolution offered anticolonial writers ways of thinking about challenging imperialism as well as lessons for independence. At the same time, Haitian indigénisme and the versions of Haitian culture and religion that circulated internationally during the US occupation inspired a reconsideration of the Africanness of Caribbean culture. This chapter will also make comparisons to the francophone Negritude movement centred especially in Martinique and its revaluation of Africa through Haiti. Writers considered include C. L. R. James, Derek Walcott, Eric Walrond, Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming, Jean Rhys, Alejo Carpentier, Édouard Glissant, and Aimé Césaire.

The routes of Caribbean interactions with Africa during the 1950s and 1960s were several and varied: not only did Africa appear in the literature as forms and interrogations of an ideological homeland, but African and Caribbean writers met on European soil, exchanged ideas in conversations with each other, and became part of literary projects fostered through European universities and publishers. During this period, many writers and scholars from across the Caribbean region moved to the newly independent African countries, and engaged with the cultures in their writing and professional and personal lives. Conversely, many African writers turned to the Caribbean for models of how to engage with the cultures of colonialism and their afterlife. This chapter examines the pilgrimage of identity and diaspora enacted through the African–Caribbean connection, the new literary movements that it generated, as well as the shared project of political and cultural decolonization.

This chapter details the seminal influence of Senegalese Catholic intellectual Alioune Diop on the Catholic Church between the 1940s and 1970s. A leading figure in the negritude movement who championed independence for Europe’s African colonies, Diop was also a devout Catholic who called on the Church to repudiate Eurocentrism and live up to its claims to be universal and embrace all peoples. He insisted that the Church had an important role to play in defending vulnerable peoples and promoting development in the “Third World.” Diop’s advocacy had a great impact during the papacies of John XXIII and Paul VI and contributed to the reorientation of the Catholic Church during and after the Second Vatican Council.