Aimé Césaire

Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) was a writer, educator, essayist and politician born in the French colony of Martinique. As a young man Césaire received a scholarship to study at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he became politically active following his experience of racism. In particular he was instrumental in the establishment of the literary review L'Étudiant Noir, which opened up a forum for black participation in an academy otherwise dominated by ‘white’ publications.

Césaire would later return to Martinique where he continued to write and became an educator. He was one of the key figures in the Négritude movement of the 1930s, which adopted a style of austere realism and anti-colonial sentiment which would be so prominent in his writings. He was a significant figure in populist and communist politics at various points in his life and only retired from politics in 2001, seven years before his death aged 94.

Today, Césaire’s 1950 publication Discours sur le colonialisme is one of the principle texts informing postcolonial studies and literatures. Its uncompromising polemic style vocally denounces the practices manifest in the imperialist projects of various nations, drawing striking colonial parallels with The Holocaust just five years after the fall of the Nazi Party in 1945. The boldness of the essay and its relentless, tangible anger mark it as one of the defining literary moments in the decline of the European colonial project.