Maurice Thorez

Maurice Thorez (1900-1964) was a major figure in the history of twentieth-century France and European Communism for over three decades. Under his leadership, the French Communist Party (PCF) became France's largest political party and one of the most important communist parties in the West. Born in a mining village, Thorez left school at the age of 12 and would go on to helm the PCF in a rapid rise that paralleled Stalin's consolidation of power in the Soviet Union. After World War II, he became a minister, and briefly deputy prime minister, before the Cold War excluded communists from political power. The PCF became known as 'the party of Maurice Thorez', as a leader cult around Thorez was created that mirrored the cult of personality' around Stalin. This book is based on a wealth of original source material, including Thorez's diaries and notebooks. John Bulaitis outlines how Thorez's political life intersected with and was shaped by key historical events. At its heart, the book explores the paradox of the mass communist movement in France: its ability to fuse attachment to the French nation with fervent loyalty to the Soviet Union and Stalinist practices.

In The Letter in Black Radical Thought, Tendayi Sithole analyzes the letters of Sylvia Wynter, Assata Shakur, George Jackson, Aìme Césaire, and Frantz Fanon. Each letter is taken as an important site where dehumanization is criticized by means of black radical thought which these figures advocate.

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.