Morning Comrades.
Back when I was still at University doing my MA I read by Aimé Césaire’ 1955 book, “Discourse on Colonialism” and truth be told I wasn’t ready for it. Granted, this was back in 2002 and whilst both my official and unofficial education was well underway, within the very white and youthful structures of anti-fascist and anti-capitalist work in London and later Germany, realities such as Colonialism and its effects, as well as its role within Capitalism weren’t really part of the conversation. On a side note, I vividly remember approaching one of my History Professors in 1996 with the question of colonialism within the context of the British History Classes I was signed up and being met with total refusal thereof. We’ve come some way and we have millions of miles to go.
Thus; I wanted to share this work and some thoughts about it with you. I do consider it to be one of the most important works on the subject of Colonialism today, and given the current context of history unfolding, this recommendation comes with a sense of urgency.
Discourse on Colonialism (Original Title: 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 Éditions Réclame, a small publisher associated with the French Communist Party. Five years later, he then edited and republished it with the anticolonial publisher Présence africaine. The 1955 edition is the one with the widest circulation today and 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.
Aimé Césaire eloquently describes the brutal impact of capitalism and colonialism on both the colonizer and colonized, exposing the contradictions and hypocrisy implicit in western notions of “progress” and “civilization” upon encountering the “savage”, “uncultured,” or “primitive.”
Here, Césaire reaffirms African values, identity, and culture, and their relevance, reminding us that “the relationship between consciousness and reality are extremely complex… It is equally necessary to decolonize our minds, our inner life, at the same time that we decolonize society.”
With that, let’s get into its role today and Marxist applications.
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