Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Discourse on Colonialism, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Colonial Racism and the Moral Corruption of Europe
The Consequences of Colonial Plunder
Scholarship and Power
Class Struggle and Revolution
Summary
Analysis
Césaire compares capitalist society to “a beast” that feasts on people and argues that it has lost control in the 20th century, growing unhealthy but remaining just as cruel and sadistic. It is not the Nazis’ fault, but rather has a deeper source. Césaire cites the Comte de Lautréamont’s hit book Chants de Maldoror, a controversial collection of nightmarish and satanic poetry, as evidence of how central this cruelty has become to European culture. While many critics interpreted the book through “occultist and metaphysical commentaries,” the book is actually a “scarcely allegorical picture of a society in which the privileged, comfortably seated, refuse to move closer together so as to make room for the new arrival.” Lautréamont’s protagonist represents the Western bourgeoisie that is responsible for all the violence of recent history and finds itself experiencing “progressive dehumanization” as a result.
Césaire again emphasizes that the corruption and violence of European colonialism are inseparable from capitalism: because industrialists wanted profit and the best way to achieve it was to take resources by force and enslave people rather than pay them, expropriation and violence became the norm. While many contemporary students learn that the self-reflective experimentation of modernist and postmodernist literature reflects an increasing instability in moral values and concepts of humanity, Césaire offers the slightly different interpretation that this literature, like the Chants de Maldoror, was specifically addressing the corruption of European culture due to capitalism and colonialism. In other words, like Hollywood movies that focus on the hollowness of stardom, this literature reflects bourgeois Europeans’ realization that they have accidentally brought “progressive dehumanization” upon themselves.
Themes
Césaire turns to another influential figure, the anthropologist Roger Caillois, who believes himself responsible for correcting ethnographers who increasingly see non-Europeans as equal. Caillois and many other academics (like the essayist Henri Massis) believe that “ the West alone knows how to think” and that nonwhite people are “incapable of logic.” They maintain this belief even though their primary source, the French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, retracted his argument and instead concluded that “these [non-European] minds do not differ from ours.” Caillois also conveniently forgets all the innovations of non-Europeans: Egyptians invented “arithmetic and geometry,” for instance, and Islamic philosophers were rationalists long before European ones were.
Like the work of Gourou, Tempels, and Mannoni, Caillois’s anthropology advances a racist picture of the world, in which white people are inherently superior to nonwhite people and therefore have some natural right to dominate them. The crucial difference is that Caillois is trying to defend these other thinkers’ racist scholarship against a backlash among other writers who, like Césaire, pointed out that it is self-serving and academically dishonest. In other words, while Gourou, Tempels, and Mannoni were using racist social science to justify colonialism, Caillois is using racist social science—namely, the idea that white people are better at science, logic, and knowledge—to justify racist social science. He thereby explicitly argues for the assumption that implicitly lies behind Gourou, Tempels, and Mannoni’s work: Europeans’ beliefs and opinions about non-European people are more valid than non-Europeans people’s knowledge about themselves. This idea remains popular in contemporary anthropology, whose proponents often end up speaking for the people they study precisely so that those people cannot speak in their own voices.
Themes
Beyond wrongly believing in white people’s intellectual supremacy, Caillois also sees them as morally superior because he thinks that they have greater respect for life and dignity—but again, he believes this only because he conveniently omits the crimes they have committed. (Césaire points out that, at the very time he is writing, white Frenchmen are torturing people in Algeria and Morocco.) Next, Caillois also sees European Christianity as inherently superior to non-Europeans’ “voodoo type” religions, because of Christianity’s “dogmas and mysteries,” “symbolism” and “glory.” Caillois concludes that “the only ethnography is white”—meaning that only Europeans are worthy of studying others. But Césaire accuses Caillois of acting as though anthropological museums full of stolen artifacts are somehow an adequate recompense for colonialism. Rather, Césaire concludes, it would have been better for Europe to leave non-European civilizations intact and vital rather than tearing them apart and making museums out of the pieces.
Césaire has already established the formula for colonial propaganda, so it should not surprise his readers that Caillois also seems to follow it: he says the opposite of the truth—that European empires have been benevolent rulers—in order to justify actual exploitation and genocide under colonialism. While 21st-century readers might easily dismiss Caillois’s claims about the relative superiority of the Christian religion because they are based on pure prejudice, this does not mean that this kind of European cultural supremacist thinking does not still have profound effects in the present day. The museum is an important example: present-day museums in European capital cities like Paris, London, and Madrid are still full of objects (ranging from gold and diamonds to indigenous art and clothing) that were illegally looted during colonialism and should be the rightful property of the now-independent former colonies from which they were stolen. However, museums refuse to give these objects back. This shows not only how universities (and anthropologists in particular) still cite the sanctity of scientific knowledge in order to perpetuate inequalities that originated in colonialism, but also how they continue to believe that Europeans (and a few other national groups, like Americans and Australians) have a greater capacity for knowing about Asia, Africa, and Latin America than the people who actually live in those places do.
Themes
Still, “Caillois is moderate” compared to other Europeans because he doesn't believe in genocide. This is not because Caillois believes other groups deserve to live, but merely because he wants to be generous—but he can retract this generosity at any time. Caillois argued that unequal groups of people should not have “an inequality of rights,” but instead that the powerful have “an increased responsibility.” Césaire thinks it is clear that he means the responsibility for “ruling the world.” Césaire clarifies that Caillois’s philosophy was not particularly insightful or valuable, but that it nonetheless represents the way countless Europeans think, specifically “the Western petty bourgeoisie.” Ironically, while they praise humanism, “the West has never been further from” it.
By pointing out that Caillois is at once inexcusably racist and also “moderate” compared to many members of the European elite, Césaire again underlines the extent to which white supremacist perspectives are baked into the foundations of European culture. Caillois’s conclusion—that people are unequal by nature, but should be equal in society—is a common point among contemporary social scientists (although, tellingly, virtually only white ones). However, it is incoherent for two reasons. First, there is no solid evidence behind it: Caillois has no proof that white people are naturally better thinkers and scientists than nonwhite people, just like no contemporary scientist has ever been able to prove this in the several decades since. Second, it is incoherent to say that some people are better than others by nature, because determining what is “better” requires having certain cultural beliefs about what is desirable and undesirable. (For instance, in individualistic, capitalist societies, it may be assumed that having a higher IQ—or analytical intelligence—is inherently better, but other societies might value emotional intelligence and empathy instead.) Caillois ends up justifying colonialism by saying that Europeans know what is best for non-European people, while those people do not know what is best for themselves—which is clearly a self-serving justification for colonialism
Themes
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