Discourse on colonialism

102 pages

English language

Published May 14, 2000

ISBN:
978-1-58367-024-8
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5 stars (4 reviews)

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 Éditions 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.

3 editions

to see clearly, to think clearly - that is dangerously

5 stars

Owning up to the fact that this was my first time reading it entirely, as a book, not in pieces, not on a pdf with my eyes scanning for the bits that I knew I was looking for. It's for a piece of writing I'm working on, and it was actually a really rewarding read. I learned things in Robin Kelley's preface, and I really liked the Lautréamont passages (mainly bc of a long standing love for 19th century French lit and for the specific lice poem in Le Chant de Maldoror) - for some reason not one of the bits that was captured and transmitted to me in my peripheral/plundering/utilitarian relationship to the text until now. I also really liked the fun gothic imagery, and the surrealist engagement with the abject throughout (looking like a communion wafer dipped in shit/condemned to chewing on Hitler's vomit/the idea, an annoying fly)

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