- Length
- 102 pagesPinkham, Discourse on Colonialism, Monthly Review Press, 2000, with an introduction by Robin D. G. Kelley
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Discourse on Colonialism
A hundred pages of controlled fury arguing that Europe's crimes against Europeans in the 1940s were its colonial methods returning home. It is the founding text of anticolonial philosophy and the most quotable book in this section that cannot be quoted here.
- Date
- 1950
- Author
- Aimé Césaire
- Region
- Martinique and Paris
- Language
- French
- 1972 English, Joan Pinkham Reissued 2000 with a new introduction; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Exchange — Both: answers an earlier work and drew a later one
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Narrative — Argument carried by story, image or confession
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years to the reply
- 2 years
- Years back to what it answers
- 5 years
A hundred pages that gave the anticolonial movement its argument, written by a man who was simultaneously a mayor, a deputy in the French National Assembly and one of the great poets of the century.
What the book says
A short pamphlet by a poet, arguing that European civilisation is indefensible and that colonialism is what made it so. Césaire's central move is to turn the accusation round. The colonial project claimed to civilise, and his question is what it did to the people who ran it: colonisation, he argues, decivilises the coloniser, brutalises him, awakens buried instincts, and each time a governor tortures or a bishop looks away, a poison seeps into the veins of Europe. From this comes the passage that made the book notorious. What Europe could not forgive Hitler, on Césaire's account, was not the crime itself but that he applied to Europeans the procedures Europe had until then reserved for Arabs, coolies and Africans - so Nazism was not an aberration in European civilisation but its methods coming home. The second half turns on the scholars: the geographer who explained that tropical peoples cannot produce science, the psychologist who diagnosed a dependency complex in the colonised, and the missionary who discovered a Bantu philosophy conveniently completed by the Gospel.
What it argues
That colonisation is a relation which degrades both parties and that no humanism survives it. Césaire's method is to take European civilisation's account of itself and hold it against the record: the same nations that produced the declaration of the rights of man produced the Congo, and the contradiction is not a lapse but the arrangement. The boomerang argument follows. A society that has spent centuries authorising cruelty at a distance has trained itself, and the training returns. He also refuses the two available consolations - that colonialism brought roads and hospitals, which he answers by counting what was destroyed, and that pre-colonial societies were primitive, which he answers by describing what they were.
What it answered
Colonial scholarship, and the French left's ambivalence about empire. Césaire was a Communist deputy when he wrote it and the book is aimed partly at his own side, which had opposed fascism in Europe while accepting the colonies. He is also answering, in advance, the argument that decolonisation would be a loss to the colonised.
How it argues
By rhetoric, and unapologetically. This is a poet's polemic: repetition, catalogue, apostrophe, and a controlled contempt that accumulates rather than argues. There are no footnotes and few statistics, and the scholars are quoted at length precisely so that their own words can do the work. Whether it is philosophy is a fair question and the answer this section gives is that a demonstration can be conducted in any register that convinces, and that the Hitler passage is an argument rather than an insult.
The moment
Martinique and Paris in 1950, with Césaire mayor of Fort-de-France and a deputy in the French National Assembly, having earlier campaigned successfully for Martinique to become a French department - a decision he spent the rest of his life defending and qualifying. He had coined négritude with Senghor and Damas as a student in the 1930s. Six years later he resigned from the Communist Party in a public letter after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, refusing, as he put it, to have the colonial question subordinated to anyone's strategy.
How it travelled
Into every anticolonial movement and then into the university. The 1955 edition appeared in the year of the Bandung conference and circulated across the francophone colonial world; Fanon, Nkrumah, Senghor and a generation of independence leaders read it. Its academic career came later, through the postcolonial studies that formed in the 1980s, and it is now a standard set text. Its most quoted passage is also its most contested, and it is regularly cited by people who have not read the pages around it.
The strongest objection
That the boomerang thesis explains too much and can be checked. If Nazism was colonial method coming home, then the states with the largest empires should have been the most vulnerable, and Britain and France were not the ones that produced it; the specific ideological and historical sources of the Nazi programme are documented and are not colonial administration. Historians who take the connection seriously - and some do, tracing continuities from the German campaigns in South-West Africa - generally argue for a contributing lineage rather than an identity. Césaire's claim is stronger than the evidence supports, and it is doing rhetorical work he needed: nothing else would have made a European readership feel the thing he was describing.
Why read it
Because it takes an hour, is written by one of the century's great poets, and contains more force per page than anything else in this section. Read the Kelley introduction and the Letter to Maurice Thorez alongside it; the second shows what it cost him to hold both halves of his position.
- First printed
- 1950
- First in English
- 1972
- Digitised
- No
The 1955 Présence Africaine edition is expanded and is the standard text. Césaire's Letter to Maurice Thorez of 1956, breaking with the French Communist Party after the invasion of Hungary, is often printed with it and is essential to understanding his position.
Joan Pinkham's English of 1972, reissued 2000, is the standard and is in copyright, as is the French.
Where it stands
Live. The argument that European humanism and European colonialism are the same phenomenon seen from two ends is a standing position in political philosophy, and the specific claim about fascism as colonial method returned is discussed by historians who mostly qualify and do not dismiss it.
On quoting this book
In copyright in French and English. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether the Hitler passage is a historical claim or a rhetorical device is argued, and Césaire does not settle it. Whether négritude is a liberation or a trap was disputed by Fanon within two years and by Soyinka more mockingly later. And Césaire's own political record - the architect of Martinique's departmentalisation writing the case against colonialism - is either a contradiction or the most honest position available to a colonised politician in 1950, and his readers divide on which.