Reading :: Discourse on Colonialism

Discourse on Colonialism
By Aime Cesaire

This book was first published in 1950. According to Robin D.G. Kelley, who wrote the introduction, it was part of a wave of postwar anticolonial literature (p.8). Cesaire was born in Martinique in 1913, went to study in Paris in 1931, and began his awakening there. He and his wife returned to Fort-de-France in 1939, shortly before France fell and Vichy rule began. Thousands of French sailors arrived on the island, shattering his illusion of colorblind French brotherhood and radicalizing Cesaire. Cesaire went on to develop his anticolonialist views, including his view that fascism is just colonialism turned on Westerners (p.19). Kelley notes that Cesaire closes his 1950 book with the "shocking" assertion that the Soviet Union was a template for a better society (p.23); Cesaire would go on to reject Stalinism in 1956 (p.25), and even in the 1950 book he advocated for an "unmaterialist" (p.24) set of new spiritual values (p.25). 

Kelley emphasizes that in this book, Cesaire argues that "colonial domination required a whole way of thinking, a discourse in which everything that is advanced, good, and civilized is defined and measured in European terms" (p.27). And Kelley adds that "In the end, Discourse was never intended to be a road map or a blueprint for revolution. It is poetry and therefore revolt. It is an act of insurrection, drawn from Cesaire's own miraculous weapons" (p.28).

Now to the book itself. Cesaire indicts Europe on the first page:

The fact is that the so-called European civilization -- "Western" civilization -- as it has been shaped by two centuries of bourgeois rule, is incapable of solving the two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem; that Europe is unable to justify itself either before the bar of "reason" or before the bar of "conscience"; and that, increasingly, it takes refuge in a hypocrisy which is all the more odious because it is less and less likely to deceive. (p.31)

and

the chief culprit in this domain is Christian pedantry, which laid down the dishonest equations Christianity = civilization, paganism savagery, from which there could not but ensue abominable colonialist and racist consequences. (p.33)

Cesaire allows that "is a good thing to place different civilizations in contact with each other; that it is an excellent thing to blend different worlds" (p.33) -- but colonization has not done this (pp.33-34). Instead, colonization places an infinite gap between civilizations (p.34), and in doing so, decivilizes the colonizer (p.35), making Europe savage (p.36) and leading to Hitler: Hitler demonstrates that capitalist society can't establish the concept of rights of all men or individual ethics (p.37). In fact,

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. (p.39)

Indeed, in treating others like an animal, the colonizer transforms himself into one -- the boomerang effect of colonization (p.41). He adds: "colonization = "thingification" (p.42). And he vaunts the old societies that colonization replaced: "They were communal societies, never societies of the many for the few" and "They were societies that were not only ante-capitalist, as has been said, but also anti-capitalist" (p.44). 

Europe is not the only problem: "the barbarism of Western Europe has reached an incredibly high level, being only surpassed -- far surpassed, it is true -- by the barbarism of the United States" (p.47). For better models, we have to look elsewhere:

It is a new society that we must create, with the help of all our brother slaves, a society rich with all the productive power of modern times, warm with all the fraternity of olden days.

For some examples showing that this is possible, we can look to the Soviet Union. (p.52)

In the next chapter, he discusses the issue of personal vs. systemic oppression:

And do not seek to know whether personally these gentlemen are in good or bad faith, whether personally they have good or bad intentions. Whether personally -- that is, in the private conscience of Peter or Paul -- they are or are not colonialists, because the essential thing is that their highly problematical subjective good faith is entirely irrelevant to the objective social implications of the evil work they perform as watchdogs of colonialism. (p.55)

He concludes that Europe, if it is not careful, will perish from the void it has created around itself (p.75). And 

the salvation of Europe is not a matter of a revolution in methods. It is a matter of the Revolution -- the one which, until such time as there is a classless society, will substitute for the narrow tyranny of a dehumanized bourgeoisie the preponderance of the only class that still has a universal mission, because it suffers in its flesh from all the wrongs of history, from all the universal wrongs: the proletariat. (p.78)

That is, he returns to Marxism-Leninism as a possible template for a post-colonialist Europe that can deliver on its promises. 

As Kelley mentions in the Introduction, Cesaire had been a leader in the Communist party of Martinique since 1945, so by 1950 he was fairly committed. Furthermore, with fascism defeated, the world had become bipolar, with the US leading the a coalition of capitalist democracies and the USSR leading a coalition of communist and socialist republics. Which path would history take? But by 1956 it had become clear that Stalinism could not deliver on all of its promises: Stalin died of a brain hemorrhage in 1953, and Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" was delivered in 1956, but more broadly, it became clear that the US and USSR were fighting proxy battles on others' soil (e.g., the Korean War of 1950-1953). The USSR could not deliver on the promises that had made it so attractive to audiences such as Cesaire (although those promises continued to inspire people through the 1980s). 

Nevertheless, as Kelley argues, Cesaire's remarks about the USSR are not central to his discourse -- without them, the piece still stands as an indictment against European colonialism. For that reason, this short book is definitely worth a read.