Discourse on Colonialism

This classic work, first published in France in 1950, profoundly influenced the generation of scholars and activists at the forefront of liberation struggles in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. More than twenty years later, when published for the first time in English, Discourse on Colonialism inspired a new generation engaged in the Civil Rights, Black Power, and anti-war movements, and has sold more than 75,000 copies to date.

Césaire eloquently describes the brutal impact of capitalist colonialism, showing how it is in the nature of colonial structures to “decivilize” the colonizers, turning them into hateful racists, murderers, and torturers. European fascism, he argues, is nothing but the continent’s colonial violence returning to corrupt the homelands – a “boomerang effect.” It is “necessary to decolonize our minds, our inner life, at the same time that we decolonize society,” states Césaire, who was born in 1913 in Martinique, where he became a leader of the Communist Party.

Discourse on Colonialism is a “dancing flame in a bonfire,” writes Robin D. G. Kelley in his insightful introduction to the text. Also included in the volume is an interview with Césaire by the poet René Depestre.