Book Review:Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism

Césaire Book Review
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Cesaire's Book Review
This book was published amidst a rise in postwar anti-colonial literature in the 1950s. In this book, Aime Cesaire seeks to encapsulate the whole experience of colonialism and highlight the systematic nature of racism, creating the foundation of Negritude and supporting the epistemological power of experience and poetry (47). Aime argues that colonialism and Eurocentric white supremacy relies exclusively on dehumanizing blacks to portray whiteness as a privilege. He also disputes claims that colonization has a civilizing effect (47). Instead, he suggests that colonization deliberately depersonalizes the bodies and minds of the colonized (42). He says that redrafting and obliterating occupied people's cultural aspects and resources is a way of projecting white superiority that seems natural and acceptable. This book provides the groundwork for post-colonialism and race theories and provides an essential critical conversation about race blindness.
The author of Discourse on Colonialism claims that colonialism was never a genuine movement whose purpose was to enhance the live hood of the colonized people (34). Instead, the colonizer's intentions were purely economic and self-centered. Aime further claims that the colonial powers created two significant problems by acquiring colonies and exploiting them: the colonial and the proletariat problem (47). Cesaire debates the relationship between savagery and civilization and singles out the hypocrisy of colonialism (34). He contends that it contradicts that colonizers claimed to rescue the colonized nations from savages by destroying and killing the land where those savages resided. The colonizers were savages themselves. Cesaire argues that colonization does not happen innocently (34). A country that colonizes and promotes a civilization justifying colonization is uncivilized (36). He further labels the colonizer's savages for their doings in the colonized countries. Cesaire described the association between colonizers and colonized as one plagued with intimidation, forced labor, theft, rape, compulsory crops, and mistrust and degraded masses. This book serves as the focal text of postcolonial literature, what the author describes as the colonizers de-civilizing the colonized.
Aime Cesaire was born in June 2006, 1923 at Basse-Pointe, Martinique. He was a politician, poet, and playwright. He was one of the founding fathers of Negritude, an infl...