Notes on Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism
Peter's notes
Notes
- p. 10 a list of justifications/excuses as what colonialism is NOT:
- Evangelization
- Philanthropic enterprise
- A desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny
- A project undertaken for the greater glory of God
- An attempt to extend the rule of law
- p. 10 In contrast, colonialism IS "appetite and force"
- p. 11 the initial colonizers were no hypocrites: they were proudly racist conquerers.
- p. 13 colonization (em)brutalizes the colonizers.
- p. 15 humanism as a racist diminishment & fragmentation of human rights.
- p. 15 Renan again
- p. 17 the virtue of productivity of land
- p. 18 "like the invasions of the Franks and the Goths" ...
- p. 21 the other side of progressivism
- p. 22 old tyrants get along with new ones
- p. 24/25 colonization cannot take credit for the benefits of "civilization" or the advances that have occurred.
- p. 29 distance between races/nations/cultures as emphasized into insurmountable difference.
- p. 31 the exoticism inherent in the ideal of returning to a precolonial past.
- p. 31 we filter the information we consume to nourish our falsely clear conscience.
- p. 33/34 the culpability of those who produce the distortions required to absolve colonialism.
- p. 34/35 discipline specific concrete examples of the ideological labor that defends colonialism.
- p. 40 the idea of a psychological need for dependence.
- p. 41 the colonized don't want liberation, and any indication that they do is a kind of madness on their part.
- p. 43 abstraction/rationalization as a defense that obscures bloody realities
- p. 44 racist notions of dilution in 1940's/50's France seem not that different from those of today.