This talk draws on one chapter of a book in progress, tentatively titled “Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World.” In it I analyze efforts after World War II by Léopold Sedar Senghor from Senegal, Aimé Césaire from Martinique, and their African and Caribbean colleagues to fashion non-national forms of decolonization at a time, which I call the postwar opening, when the political solution to the problem of colonial freedom was not yet settled.