Discourse on Colonialism

Discourse on Colonialism (French: Discours sur le colonialisme) is an essay by Aimé Césaire, a poet and politician from Martinique who helped found the négritude movement in Francophone literature. Césaire first published the essay in 1950 in Paris with Éditions 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 (Paris and Dakar).^[1] The 1955 edition is the one with the widest circulation today and 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.^{[2][3][failed verification]}