Discourse on Colonialism

by

Aimé Césaire

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Themes and Colors
Colonial Racism and the Moral Corruption of Europe Theme Icon
The Consequences of Colonial Plunder Theme Icon
Scholarship and Power Theme Icon
Class Struggle and Revolution Theme Icon
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As a poet and writer, Césaire pays special attention to how scholars have participated in colonialism. Contrary to their official roles as seekers of truth, in reality European academics deliberately generated conclusions that supported colonial policies. Specifically, to deflect criticisms of colonial violence and robbery, scholars blamed colonialism’s effects on “comfortable, hollow notions” of racial difference and human nature. In fact, Césaire shows, not only do these dishonest ideas continue to inform bad academic scholarship, but colonialism is actually foundational to academia itself. Therefore, beyond avoiding the errors of the past, thinkers must also account for their assumptions and social positions as producers of knowledge whose words have consequences.

Césaire shows how European intellectuals rationalized colonialism to lend it legitimacy, even when they had no convincing evidence. Césaire first looks at the work of anthropologist Pierre Gourou, who bafflingly declared that “tropicality” stunted the growth of non-European nations and argued that only white people are capable of developing science and civilization. While both these claims are obviously false, Gourou’s aim was never to find the truth: he merely wanted a job advising the colonial government. In fact, Césaire even suggests that Gourou knew that his scholarship would promote violence, since he noted that “economic development” for France would require “regression of the natives.” Gourou ended up fulfilling the colonial government’s will by advancing a racist argument that protected it. Similarly, Césaire addresses the work of psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni, who argued that colonization is natural because Europeans have an inherent psychological need to conquer as part of their “initiation rights” into “manhood,” while the Madagascan people he studied had a “dependency complex” and wanted or needed to be controlled by some more “civilized” population. Mannoni made colonization seem beneficial to the colonized, but only because he erased those same colonized people’s voices and instead based his theory on pure speculation and, like Gourou, accepted the unjustified assumption that there is an inherent psychological difference between Europeans and non-Europeans. Mannoni’s science did not lead to racism: it came from racism, and it was designed to help the French colonial government maintain its control of Madagascar. Gourou, Mannoni, and other scholars Césaire criticizes (like the Belgian Reverend Tempels) shared a common tactic: they explained physical violence by making reference to ideas. (Gourou explained the inequalities of life in European colonies through native people’s “tropicality,” Tempels through the supposedly humble “Bantu philosophy,” and Mannoni through the “dependency complex.”) This explanatory strategy not only shifts blame off of colonial powers, but also suggests that material differences in power—like some people ruling with absolute power over others who are powerless, or some people being wealthy and other people being enslaved—come from people’s differing ideas and inherent natures, rather than some people’s self-interested decision to subjugate and control others. In other words, these scholars’ theories suggest that oppression is natural, acceptable, and unavoidable, rather than immoral and worth undoing.

By exposing the interdependence between colonial politics and colonial research, Césaire shows that a scholar’s social position can be as important as their conclusions: not only does it affect how they ask and answer research questions, but it also determines how their research is used after it leaves their hands. Through this analysis, Césaire explains his own project as a scholar who wants to be taken seriously while writing in an unconventional form and implicitly asks his readers to critically consider their own political interests and the way these interests might affect their understanding or interpretation of global history. Césaire specifically shows how the academics he critiques lose their own voices and become “watchdogs of colonialism.” For instance, the possibility that Gourou secretly saw the evil in colonialism only shows that Gourou consented to his authority as a scholar being used as an ideological tool. Similarly, Mannoni’s argument that Africans are incapable of psychological development was an indirect response to Madagascar’s budding independence movement, and his research was designed to help French people continue to believe in the benevolence of French colonialism when presented with evidence to the contrary. This is why Mannoni called the native people’s rebellion during the Malagasy Uprising “a collective madness” and claimed that their “oppression” was “imaginary.”

Gourou and Mannoni’s work not only loses credibility because it sprung from political commitments, but also shows how political power facilitates the creation and dissemination of academic knowledge. In a sense, Gourou and Mannoni could be taken seriously only because, as white male researchers, their opinions about the people they studied were considered more authoritative than the actual voices of those people. Césaire makes this point explicitly when he critiques the anthropologist Roger Caillois, who insisted that ethnography (fieldwork-based studies of culture) must be reserved for white people because, as Césaire puts it, “the West alone knows how to think.” By arguing that knowledge itself must remain in white hands, Caillois reveals how the power dynamics of knowledge both linked colonial-era research to imperial governments and made researchers’ claims authoritative, even when they speculated without evidence. In response to white European men’s nearly exclusive claim to scholarly knowledge, Césaire offers another kind of knowledge in this book. He combines the innovations of European theory and social science with his own distinctive, poetic style to offer an argument that is neither linear nor metaphorical. The form of Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism allows him to propose an alternative way of knowing that relies on the rhetorical strategies of poetry and cultural analysis of living as a black man in a white culture, all while underlining the way that scholars abuse the illusion of certainty to pass off ideology as fact.

Césaire shows contemporary scholars why academia’s colonial roots affect all of the knowledge they produce. This does not make all of their work pointless: rather, it means that they must critically examine the history of the ideas they reproduce and recognize that, as researchers, they are ethically responsible for the effects of their arguments and the biases they transmit.

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Scholarship and Power Quotes in Discourse on Colonialism

Below you will find the important quotes in Discourse on Colonialism related to the theme of Scholarship and Power.
Section 3 Quotes

One cannot say that the petty bourgeois has never read anything. On the contrary, he has read everything, devoured everything.
Only, his brain functions after the fashion of certain elementary types of digestive systems. It filters. And the filter lets through only what can nourish the thick skin of the bourgeois’s clear conscience.
Before the arrival of the French in their country, the Vietnamese were people of an old culture, exquisite and refined. To recall this fact upsets the digestion of the Banque d’Indochine. Start the forgetting machine!

Related Characters: Aimé Césaire (speaker)
Page Number: 52-3
Explanation and Analysis:
Section 4 Quotes

Our Gourou has slipped his leash; now we’re in for it; he’s going to tell everything; he’s beginning: “The typical hot countries find themselves faced with the following dilemma: economic stagnation and protection of the natives or temporary economic development and regression of the natives.” “Monsieur Gourou, this is very serious! I’m giving you a solemn warning: in this game it is your career which is at stake.” So our Gourou chooses to back off and refrain from specifying that, if the dilemma exists, it exists only within the framework of the existing regime; that if this paradox constitutes an iron law, it is only the iron law of colonialist capitalism, therefore of a society that is not only perishable but already in the process of perishing.
What impure and worldly geography!

Related Characters: Aimé Césaire (speaker), Pierre Gourou
Page Number: 57
Explanation and Analysis:

In short, you tip your hat to the Bantu life force, you give a wink to the immortal Bantu soul. And that's all it costs you! You have to admit you're getting off cheap!
As for the government, why should it complain? Since, the Rev. Tempels notes with obvious satisfaction, “from their first contact with the white men, the Bantu considered us from the only point of view that was possible to them, the point of view of their Bantu philosophy” and “integrated us into their hierarchy of life forces at a very high level.”
In other words, arrange it so that the white man, and particularly the Belgian, and even more particularly Albert or Leopold, takes his place at the head of the hierarchy of Bantu life forces, and you have done the trick. You will have brought this miracle to pass: the Bantu god will take responsibility for the Belgian colonialist order, and any Bantu who dares to raise his hand against it will be guilty of sacrilege.

Related Characters: Aimé Césaire (speaker), Reverend Tempels
Page Number: 59
Explanation and Analysis:

It is the destiny of the Occidental to face the obligation laid down by the commandment Thou shalt leave thy father and thy mother. This obligation is incomprehensible to the Madagascan. At a given time in his development, every European discovers in himself the desire … to break the bonds of dependency, to become the equal of his father. The Madagascan, never! He does not experience rivalry with the paternal authority, “manly protest,” or Adlerian inferiority—ordeals through which the European must pass and which are like civilized forms … of the initiation rites by which one achieves manhood…

Related Characters: Aimé Césaire, Dominique-Octave Mannoni
Related Symbols: Civilization and Barbarism
Page Number: 60
Explanation and Analysis:

(Come on, you know how it is. These Negroes can't even imagine what freedom is. They don't want it, they don't demand it. It's the white agitators who put that into their heads. And if you gave it to them, they wouldn't know what to do with it.)

Related Characters: Aimé Césaire (speaker), Dominique-Octave Mannoni
Page Number: 60
Explanation and Analysis:

And the striking thing they all have in common is the persistent bourgeois attempt to reduce the most human problems to comfortable, hollow notions: the idea of the dependency complex in Mannoni, the ontological idea in the Rev. Tempels, the idea of “tropicality” in Gourou. What has become of the Banque d'Indochine in all that? And the Banque de Madagascar? And the bullwhip? And the taxes? And the handful of rice to the Madagascan or the nhaqué? And the martyrs? And the innocent people murdered? And the bloodstained money piling up in your coffers, gentlemen? They have evaporated! Disappeared, intermingled, become unrecognizable in the realm of pale ratiocinations.

Related Characters: Aimé Césaire (speaker), Pierre Gourou, Reverend Tempels, Dominique-Octave Mannoni
Page Number: 62
Explanation and Analysis:

The supreme goal of the People-State is to preserve the original elements of the race which, by spreading culture, create the beauty and dignity of a superior humanity.

Related Characters: Adolf Hitler (speaker), Aimé Césaire
Related Symbols: Civilization and Barbarism
Page Number: 64
Explanation and Analysis:
Section 5 Quotes

His doctrine? It has the virtue of simplicity.
That the West invented science. That the West alone knows how to think; that at the borders of the Western world there begins the shadowy realm of primitive thinking which, dominated by the notion of participation, incapable of logic, is the very model of faulty thinking.

Related Characters: Aimé Césaire (speaker), Roger Caillois
Page Number: 69
Explanation and Analysis:

And the museums of which M. Caillois is so proud, not for one minute does it cross his mind that, all things considered, it would have been better not to have needed them; that Europe would have done better to tolerate the non-European civilizations at its side, leaving them alive, dynamic and prosperous, whole and not mutilated; that it would have been better to let them develop and fulfill themselves than to present for our admiration, duly labelled, their dead and scattered parts; that anyway, the museum by itself is nothing; that it means nothing, that it can say nothing, when smug self-satisfaction rots the eyes, when a secret contempt for others withers the heart, when racism, admitted or not, dries up sympathy; that it means nothing if its only purpose is to feed the delights of vanity; that after all, the honest contemporary of Saint Louis, who fought Islam but respected it, had a better chance of knowing it than do our contemporaries (even if they have a smattering of ethnographic literature), who despise it.
No, in the scales of knowledge all the museums in the world will never weigh so much as one spark of human sympathy.

Related Characters: Aimé Césaire (speaker), Roger Caillois
Related Symbols: The Museum
Page Number: 71-2
Explanation and Analysis: