Discourse on Colonialism

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1955

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Section 1

Section 2

Section 3

Section 4

Section 5

Section 6

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Section 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Section 5 Summary

Césaire describes the current state of European colonialism as a “beast” that used to be full of vitality and that now “has become anemic” (65). He compares this condition to the drama within Chants de Maldoror, an epic written by French poet, Comte de Lautréamont. In the epic, the monster and hero resemble one another. This is a critique of capitalist society by depicting how the initial heroism of European colonization is now revealing its more monstrous appearance. Césaire attributes this once again to the bourgeoisie who propagate a “law of progressive dehumanization” (68) that has come to represent current colonial violence.

Césaire uses French scholar Roger Caillois’s work as an example of a bourgeois intellectual who represents the anxiety over Western loss of identity through colonization. Caillois argues that the West is the center and origin of all intellectual thought. He dismisses any evidence of non-Western progress and advancement as minimal and exceptional to the rule. Caillois also advocates for ethnographic projects such as museums as representations of contact with non-European cultures, but which Césaire bitterly remarks that “its only purpose is to feed the delights of vanity” (71). Césaire also critiques Caillois’s notion of the West as having “additional tasks and an increased responsibility” (73) towards the colonized people. While Caillois frames this concern as a matter of conscience, Césaire argues that the scholar is perpetuating the idea of “the white man’s burden” (73). According to Césaire, these ideas represented by Caillois unfortunately represent how far removed society is from achieving true humanism.

Section 5 Analysis

This section concerns the state of modern colonialism as it nears its end. Césaire looks to examples from European literature that reveal this anxiety over the changing forms of capitalism and colonialism in the 20th century, which no longer carries the same momentum of the previous century. Césaire cites Comte de Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror as an example of a growing awareness of the ruins of capitalism and colonialism. He draws a parallel between the conflated monster and hero figure of the epic with the notion of the European colonialist, whose once glorious form has now increasingly been recognized for the devastation he wreaks.

This growing awareness of capitalist and colonial destruction produces anxiety among the modern bourgeois thinker. According to Césaire, this anxiety is best represented through the work of Roger Caillois, a French theorist whose attachment to the White Man’s Burden is so strong that he refuses to seriously acknowledge the advancements of colonized societies prior to European intervention. While Caillois’s ideas express a desire for equality, Césaire points out that his centering of Western knowledge contradicts this effort for mitigating power imbalances between European colonizers and non-European colonized people. Furthermore, Caillois’s sense of the “additional tasks and an increased responsibility” (73) that European colonialists must bear show a willful denial of how little outside intervention have benefited colonized societies. Yet the ability of colonized societies to flourish without European intervention suggests to Césaire that Europe is more reliant on colonialism to define its identity than colonized societies need Europe to help them advance socially. For Césaire, this depicts a serious weakness of European colonialist thought and foreshadows colonialism’s eventual demise.