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
“Man” and “the nation” are both bourgeois values, Césaire begins, and their inventors are the colonial nations that now threaten to destroy the whole world, including Europe itself. Although he recognizes that “historical parallels” are unreliable, Césaire considers this similar to how Rome destroyed itself after destroying the rest of the ancient world, and he quotes the historian Edgar Quinet, who pointed out that Rome believed it was uniting humanity precisely when its expansion was undermining the other civilizations that surrounded it. These other civilizations had previously buffered Rome from invaders, but once they fell, Rome collapsed inward on itself. Europe is doing the same thing.
In this concluding section, Césaire returns to his central argument: European colonialism was a capitalist project to exploit non-European resources and people through whatever means necessary, and it was supported by writers, scholars, and other propagandists who were paid to justify this exploitation through any ideology they could formulate. Because of the contradiction between this exploitation and the ideology it generated, Europe had to take increasingly drastic measures to hold onto this power, and eventually it spiraled out of control and imploded through the two World Wars. Césaire’s comparison between Europe and the Roman Empire serves not only to predict the fall of European imperialism, but also to challenge his readers to question the way that empires and the atrocities they commit are remembered: they are celebrated when they should be condemned, and readers must in turn ensure that European empires are remembered for their cruelty and corruption, in part so that their crimes are not repeated in the future.
Themes
Now, the United States believes it is the next global empire—while it publicly decries colonialism, it is busy colonizing the world through investment. Césaire warns the world against seeing the United States “as a possible liberator” and declares that its global economic expansion is a “machine for crushing, for grinding, for degrading peoples.”
Césaire wants to ensure that his readers know that colonialism has morphed, rather than disappeared, since World War II: the United States’s global economic power allows it to exploit resources and labor overseas through policies virtually identical to the ones Europe used from the 15th to 20th centuries. In other words, colonialism has entered a new phase: it is based on a globalized market economy that no longer requires explicit state support. Césaire believed that readers must remain aware of how colonial exploitation continues and strive to identify and protest the political strategies and intellectual discourses that support it.
Themes
If Western Europe does not support the rebirth of cultures in its colonies, Césaire concludes, it will forever fall into “immortal darkness.” Saving Europe requires “the Revolution,” which promises to create “a classless society” led by the proletariat, rather than the bourgeoisie.
In closing, Césaire again calls specifically for people to fight and support anticolonial, anticapitalist revolutions in Africa and Asia. These revolutions were well underway when he was writing in 1950, but their success was far from guaranteed, and it was even less certain that they would create the equal, free, and economically communalist societies Césaire wanted to see, rather than reproducing the inequalities created by capitalism. While he continues to think that Europe in its present state is “indefensible,” this does not mean it is beyond salvation: it could always decide to support movements for independence and popular sovereignty in its former colonies, even if this was unlikely. Ultimately, while Césaire’s desire for decolonization largely did get realized in the following decades, few of the new nations that formed made very much progress toward the “classless society” that many continue to fight for today.
Themes
