Aime Cesaire Quotes on Politics
Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) — Martinican poet, dramatist, and philosophical theorist of the Negritude movement Césaire developed jointly with Léopold Sédar Senghor — gave anticolonial political philosophy its founding statements in the long poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939, expanded through later editions) and the polemical Discourse on Colonialism (1950). The Discourse on Colonialism analyzes European colonization not as a temporary deformation of an otherwise sound European civilization but as the constitutive crime through which European modernity was made — and as the dehumanization that, having first been practiced on the colonized, returned in the form of European fascism. The framework shaped Fanon, the Negritude movement, the broader twentieth-century anticolonial intellectual tradition, and the contemporary postcolonial and decolonial currents.
Quotes
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Attributed to Aime Cesaire:
“Colonization equals thingification.”
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Attributed to Aime Cesaire:
“Europe is indefensible.”
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Attributed to Aime Cesaire:
“A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.”
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Attributed to Aime Cesaire:
“Negritude is the simple recognition of the fact that one is black, the acceptance of this fact and of our destiny as blacks, of our history and our culture.”
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Attributed to Aime Cesaire:
“I am of the race of those who are oppressed.”
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Attributed to Aime Cesaire:
“It is a new society that we must create, with the help of all our brother slaves, a society rich with all the productive power of modern times, warm with all the fraternity of olden days.”
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“The details supplied by Khrushchev on Stalin’s methods ... lead us to believe in the existence in these countries of a veritable state capitalism , exploiting the working class in a manner not very different from the way the working class is used in capitalist countries.”
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