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Summary
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
Europe is “decadent,” “sick,” and “dying,” Césaire begins, because it has terrorized the world but refuses to address the damage it has caused or stick up for its principles. Specifically, elite-ruled Europe must confront “the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem,” which are both of its own creation. Despite praising “reason” and “conscience,” it hypocritically violates both. Therefore, Césaire declares, “Europe is indefensible.”
Césaire introduces the contradiction between Europe’s values and its hypocritical actions, then wastes no time in calling for the end of the European-dominated global order. This can only be understood in the post-World War II colonial context in which he lived: Europe spent four centuries subjugating and dividing up the world to feed its outlandish imperial ambitions, which then imploded in two catastrophic wars that killed millions of people all across the world. In other words, according to Césaire, colonial massacres and genocides, the two World Wars, and the horrors of Nazi Germany were all consequences of the same “indefensible” hypocrisy. When Césaire compares the proletariat (or working classes) and the colonized, he means to say that their suffering is one and the same: it is capitalism, the economic system of private ownership and profit-maximization, that drove Europe to colonize the world in the first place. This shows that Césaire’s Marxism is inseparable from his anticolonialism: the revolution he calls for is not only against Europe, but against all of capitalism.
Themes
Europe has brutalized the places and people it colonized, who see through its lies and understand its weakness. Its “principal lie” is that “colonization” means “civilization,” and this lie is really a way for Europe “to legitimize [its] hateful solutions” to false problems. Colonization, in reality, was never motivated by religious sympathy, scientific wisdom, or the desire to spread freedom and justice: it was really about economics, and the people who actually led colonial conquest admitted this openly. Other people justified their actions by deciding that “Christianity = civilization, paganism = savagery.” While cultural exchange does profoundly strengthen nations by “blend[ing] different worlds” and allowing the “genius” in each to reinforce one another, this was not the purpose of colonialism. In fact, “colonization and civilization” are opposites, not synonyms, and all the “expeditions,” “statues,” and “memoranda” that colonial powers honor in their museums contain absolutely nothing of value.
Césaire elaborates on the hypocrisy of Europe by emphasizing that actions are more important than words: contrary to what Europeans and Americans continue to learn in school, their governments were never interested in spreading democracy, Christianity, or so-called Western civilization. Rather, these arguments were excuses, invented after the fact in order to retroactively justify the brutality of colonization. Ironically, while Europeans and Americans easily believe in the lie of the “civilizing mission,” the people that Europe has colonized are fully aware of its true economic motives and complete disrespect for the lives of nonwhite peoples. In short, students must look at European and American governments’ actions in the past, because the stories that their countries tell are neither trustworthy nor consistent. While foreign intervention and colonial conquest are still seen as normal, natural, and inevitable parts of history, Césaire emphasizes that Europeans actively chose to destroy existing governments in other parts of the world, enslave native peoples in order to make more money, and massacre those people when they asked for independence.
Themes
