Discourse on Colonialism

Discourse on Colonialism (French: Discours sur le colonialisme) is an essay by Aimé Césaire, a poet and politician from Martinique who helped found the négritude movement in Francophone literature. Césaire first published the essay in 1950 in Paris with Editions Réclame, a small publisher associated with the French Communist Party (PCF). Five years later, he then edited and republished it with the anticolonial publisher Présence Africaine (Paris and Dakar). The 1955 edition is the one with the widest circulation today, and it serves as a foundational text of postcolonial literature that discusses what Césaire described as the appalling affair of the European civilizing mission. Rather than elevating the non-Western world, the colonizers de-civilize the colonized.

Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism argues that colonialism was not—and had never been—a benevolent movement whose goal was to improve the lives of the colonized; instead, colonists' motives were entirely self-centered—i.e., economic exploitation. According to Césaire, by establishing these colonies and then exploiting them, the European colonial powers have created two main problems: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem. In describing the colonial problem that European civilization has created, he calls Europe "indefensible”, whose colonizers cannot be misconstrued as positive.

He bases his argument on the claim that, “no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force—is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one denial to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment”. He labels the colonizers as barbaric for their treatment of those in the colonies. He defines the relationship as one limited to “forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses”.

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