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.
[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.
[4] In describing the colonial problem that European civilization has created, he calls Europe "indefensible", whose colonizers cannot be misconstrued as positive.
He defines the relationship as one limited to "forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses".
He writes that Hitler differed in the eyes of the Europeans because he "applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the 'coolies' of India and the 'niggers' of Africa'.
In identifying the racism problem associated with the colonial relationship, he claims that Hitler and the Nazi Party's persecution of Jews during the Second World War and the Holocaust was not an aberration but rather the norm in Europe.