Aimé Césaire
Colonialism does not civilise but brutalises the coloniser and turns the colonised into things – and Black culture deserves pride, not shame.
Placement
Martinican poet and politician, co-founder of Négritude: his “Discourse on Colonialism” described colonisation as the decivilising of the coloniser – “colonisation = thingification”.
Key ideas
- Négritude
- Critique of colonialism
- Thingification
Students: Frantz Fanon
Influence
Influenced by 1
Karl Marx
influenced by
Césaire tied colonialism to capitalist Europe in Marxist terms (Discours sur le colonialisme, 1950) but refused to subsume colonial questions under class (Lettre à Maurice Thorez, 1956). A. Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (1950); Lettre à Maurice Thorez (1956)
Evidence: AI draft
Karl Marx › 1818–1883
Influenced 4
Jean-Paul Sartre
influenced
Sartre’s “Black Orpheus” (1948) quoted Césaire’s poems at length as the model of négritude as revolutionary poetry, in which surrealism, a European movement, is turned by a Black poet against Europe and the French language. J.-P. Sartre, “Orphée noir”, preface to L. S. Senghor (ed.), Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (1948)
Evidence: AI draft
Jean-Paul Sartre › 1905–1980
Frantz Fanon taught
taught ✓
Fanon was a pupil at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, where Césaire, who taught there from 1939, was among his teachers. D. Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography (2000)
Evidence: AI draft
Frantz Fanon › 1925–1961
Sylvia Wynter
influenced
Wynter took up Césaire’s ‘humanism made to the measure of the world’ for a new science of the human (‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being’, 2003). S. Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”, CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (2003); A. Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (1950)
Evidence: AI draft
Sylvia Wynter › b. 1928
Edward Said
influenced
In Culture and Imperialism (1993, ch. 3) Said read Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land and his rewriting of The Tempest (1969) as works of a culture of resistance in which the colonised reclaim their own history. E. W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993), ch. 3 “Resistance and Opposition”
Evidence: AI draft
Edward Said › 1935–2003
Criticism
Criticizes 1
Placide Tempels
criticised
Césaire argued that Tempels praised Bantu philosophy and its ‘vital force’ to leave the colonial order untouched, as a means of pacification (Discours sur le colonialisme, 1950). A. Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (1950; rev. 1955); P. Tempels, La philosophie bantoue (1945)
Evidence: AI draft
Placide Tempels › 1906–1977
Works
Colonisation decivilises the coloniser: Nazism was colonial violence turned back on Europe – and Tempels’ Bantu philosophy is an alibi.
Position
With Senghor and Léon-Gontran Damas, Césaire launched Négritude in Paris in the 1930s: an affirmation of Black history and culture against the demand to assimilate to France. His long poem “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land” gave it a voice. In the “Discourse on Colonialism” he argued that colonisation decivilises the coloniser, that Nazism shocked Europe because it applied colonial methods to Europeans, and that colonisation reduces people to things – “colonisation = thingification”. He also attacked Tempels’ Bantu philosophy as serving colonialism. In 1956 he left the French Communist Party, which he accused of subordinating colonial struggles to its line. His thought shaped Fanon and later postcolonial criticism.
Life & context
Aimé Césaire was born in 1913 in Basse-Pointe, Martinique. In Paris he met Léopold Sédar Senghor and studied at the École normale supérieure. Back in Martinique from 1939, he taught at the Lycée Schoelcher, where Frantz Fanon was among his pupils, and co-founded the journal Tropiques. From 1945 to 2001 he was mayor of Fort-de-France, and for decades a deputy in the French parliament. He died in 2008.
Further main works
- Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 1939)
- Letter to Maurice Thorez (1956)
- The Tragedy of King Christophe (1963)
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