Thinker

Aimé Césaire quotes

5 passages in English · 1913–2008 · Africana Philosophy.

Overview

Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) was a Martinican poet, dramatist, and politician who coined ‘Négritude’ in the 1930s. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land and Discourse on Colonialism couple poetic revolt with a philosophical indictment of European colonial civilization.

Main ideas

A civilization unable to solve the problems it creates is decadent; colonization equals ‘thingification’—reducing humans to instruments under domination without human contact. Unlike Senghor, he insisted Négritude is not a metaphysics but a way of living history within history after deportation and cultural fracture.

Major works

  • Cahier d'un retour au pays natal
  • Discourse on Colonialism
  • Une Tempête

Legacy

Césaire’s equation of colonization with thingification and his critique of colonial ‘civilizing’ hypocrisy feed postcolonial and Africana political philosophy.

Themes in this archive

Critique (2) · Power (2) · Time (1)

Quotes by theme

Aimé Césaire on power

  1. A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.
  2. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.
  3. My turn to state an equation: colonization = "thingification."
  4. Between colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape… No human contact, but relations of domination and submission.
  5. Négritude, in my eyes, is not a philosophy. Négritude is not a metaphysics. … It is a way of living history within history.