Scholarship and Power Theme Analysis

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.