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A review by plantingneurons
Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
This was a re-read, different format (paperback after reading digital). Still 5 stars.
“American domination—the only domination from which one never recovers. I mean from which one never recovers unscarred.”
“No, in the scales of knowledge all the museums in the world will never weigh so much as one spark of human sympathy.”
We are implored, told “to hold as enemies” using three adverbs, “loftily, lucidly, consistently,” to describe the manner of doing so, perhaps that could also imply with confidence, clarity, unerringly:
“Therefore, comrade, you will hold as enemies—loftily, lucidly, consistently—not only sadistic governors and greedy bankers, not only prefects who torture and colonists who flog, not only corrupt, check-licking politicians and subservient judges, but likewise and for the same reason, venomous journalists, goitrous academics, wreathed in dollars and stupidity, ethnographers who go in for metaphysics, presumptuous Belgian theologians, chattering intellectuals born stinking out of the thigh of Nietzsche, the paternalists, the embracers, the corrupters, the back-slappers, the lovers of exoticism, the dividers, the agrarian sociologists, the hoodwinkers, the hoaxers, the hot-air artists, the humbugs, and in general, all those who, performing their functions in the sordid division of labor for the defense of Western bourgeois society, try in diverse ways and by infamous diversions to split up the forces of Progress—even if it means denying the very possibility of Progress—all of them tools of capitalism, all of them, openly or secretly, supporters of plundering colonialism, all of them responsible, all hateful, all slave-traders, all henceforth answerable for the violence of revolutionary action.”
“American domination—the only domination from which one never recovers. I mean from which one never recovers unscarred.”
“No, in the scales of knowledge all the museums in the world will never weigh so much as one spark of human sympathy.”
We are implored, told “to hold as enemies” using three adverbs, “loftily, lucidly, consistently,” to describe the manner of doing so, perhaps that could also imply with confidence, clarity, unerringly:
“Therefore, comrade, you will hold as enemies—loftily, lucidly, consistently—not only sadistic governors and greedy bankers, not only prefects who torture and colonists who flog, not only corrupt, check-licking politicians and subservient judges, but likewise and for the same reason, venomous journalists, goitrous academics, wreathed in dollars and stupidity, ethnographers who go in for metaphysics, presumptuous Belgian theologians, chattering intellectuals born stinking out of the thigh of Nietzsche, the paternalists, the embracers, the corrupters, the back-slappers, the lovers of exoticism, the dividers, the agrarian sociologists, the hoodwinkers, the hoaxers, the hot-air artists, the humbugs, and in general, all those who, performing their functions in the sordid division of labor for the defense of Western bourgeois society, try in diverse ways and by infamous diversions to split up the forces of Progress—even if it means denying the very possibility of Progress—all of them tools of capitalism, all of them, openly or secretly, supporters of plundering colonialism, all of them responsible, all hateful, all slave-traders, all henceforth answerable for the violence of revolutionary action.”