Discourse on Colonialism

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1955

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Section 1

Section 2

Section 3

Section 4

Section 5

Section 6

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Section 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Section 3 Summary

Césaire remarks that Europe’s colonial violence has advanced from the methods and logic of oppression used by Hitler and the SS. It now includes “Christian virtues” (47), which Césaire argues is a false moral reasoning for colonial violence. This moral reasoning consists of “fine phrases” and “conventional words” (48) used to disguise the brutality of colonial violence, a quality that Césaire identifies with the bourgeoisie.

Césaire gives examples of different bourgeois thinkers who have used moral reasoning to justify colonial violence. Joseph de Maistre, a French philosopher and thinker, has written that Christopher Columbus was right in assessing that European contact with the indigenous people of the Americas cast an “anathema” (49) or curse upon the onlooker’s soul and body. Another French anthropologist and theoretician of eugenics and racialism, Georges Vacher de Lapouge has stated that colonization is the goal of producing “a superior race, leveled out by selection” (50). Ernest Psichari, a French religious thinker and soldier writes similarly that “[w]hen a superior race ceases to believe itself a chosen race, it actually ceases to be a chosen race” (50). This argument for maintaining social distance between colonizers and colonized people is further expanded upon by Auguste Émile Faguet, who argues that colonization prevents “regression, a new period of darkness and confusion, that is, another Middle Ages” (50). Césaire concludes his examples with a statement by M. Jules Romains who claims that “[t]he black race has not yet produced, will never produce, an Einstein, a Stravinsky, a Gershwin” (51). Césaire challenges this sentiment, expressing that he believes in the integrity of black people.

The European bourgeoisie do not want to hear about the cultural richness of colonized people before European colonization. While some of the first explorers will even concede that the “idea of the barbaric Negro is a European invention” (53), the bourgeois refuses to listen.

Section 3 Analysis

In this section, Césaire examines the modern bourgeois literary discourse that has contributed to the power of colonialism. He prefaces this discussion by noting that while modern bourgeois thought may not have the appearance of the explicit violence propagated by Hitler and Nazism, a close examination of these bourgeois principles and values reveals a more insidious endorsement of colonial violence. Césaire points to the “fine phrases” and “conventional words” (48) written by the modern bourgeois thinker as ways in which they mask the moral and spiritual depravity of their ideas.

Tracing the ideas of Joseph de Maistre to M. Jules Romains, Césaire illustrates how European colonialist fear of contact with non-Europeans stem from moral and spiritual panic. This fear culminates in a desire to dominate non-European cultures. Over time, the designation of difference is maintained by modern bourgeois thinkers who use the logic of racial superiority to justify European domination of colonized people. Césaire also reveals how the modern bourgeois thinker must continue to produce knowledge supporting this logic of colonialism, as the fear of Europe losing its status as a superior race of people is too threatening to the bourgeois conscience. He concludes with a criticism of M. Jules Romains’s idea about the inferiority of black people to depict how deeply rooted colonial logic can be that it naturalizes ideas about certain racial identities. Césaire points to the ways in which colonial violence has cultivated dangerous forms of social categorization such as racism that assumes intrinsic values of non-white Europeans

Césaire finds the modern bourgeois sentiment supporting colonialism to be particularly dangerous because of its unwillingness to concede to the idea that colonial logic may be flawed despite evidence supporting this notion. While Césaire believes that the modern bourgeois thinker has a responsibility to take into account the cultural richness of colonized societies prior to European intervention, he notes that the bourgeois thinker has no interest in considering the livelihoods of these societies prior to colonialism. Césaire implies that by examining the cultural richness of colonized societies prior to colonialism, the modern bourgeois thinker will realize that the colonized people are not savages or barbarians. However, the modern bourgeois thinker’s resistance to this notion reveals a willful denial of colonialism’s epistemological limits. The modern bourgeois thinker refuses to acknowledge that colonialism does more harm to the colonized people than good.