Discourse on colonialism

Blurb

Discours sur le colonialisme is an essay by Aimé Césaire, a poet and politician from Martinique who helped found the négritude movement in the Francophone literature. Césaire first published the essay in 1950 in Paris with Editions Réclame, a small publisher associated with the French Communist Party. Five years later, he then edited and republished it with the anticolonial publisher Présence Africaine. The 1955 edition is the one with the widest circulation today, and it serves as a foundational text of postcolonial literature that discusses what Césaire described as the appalling affair of the European Civilizing mission. Rather than elevating the non-Western world, the colonizers de-civilize the colonized.