Discourse on Colonialism

Cesaire's polemic stripped the "civilizing mission" of its alibi, arguing that colonial violence brutalized Europe itself and prepared the ground for fascism at home. A founder of the Negritude movement, he wrote with the compression of a poet and the force of an indictment, drawing a straight line from the colony to the concentration camp. It became a central text of anticolonial and postcolonial thought.

Its legacy. Generations of Black radical and Third World writers took it as a point of departure.