Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism: A Poetics of Anticolonialism

This essay is an introduction to Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism. The full text of Discourse on Colonialism is online here.

A Poetics of Anticolonialism

by Robin D.G. Kelley, Monthly Review, 1999

Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism might be best described as a declaration of war. I would almost call it a “third world manifesto,” but hesitate because it is primarily a polemic against the old order bereft of the kind of propositions and proposals that generally accompany manifestos. Yet, Discourse speaks in revolutionary cadences, capturing the spirit of its age just as Marx and Engels did 102 years earlier in their little manifesto.