Dehumanization and Thingification: Aime Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism

A short talk on Aime Cesaire's "Discourse on Colonialism", a small book first published by Cesaire in French in 1955 and translated into English by Joan Pinkham (Monthly Review Press, 1972). Cesaire rips into colonialism and shows how colonialism is built on dehumanization and what he calls thingification, a refusal even to see the colonized as human. In the process, he points out, the colonizer also ends up dehumanizing himself. He is very astute in this polemical work, making a number of arguments along the way, establishing the centrality to colonization of the notion that colonized territories were "waste lands" waiting for the productive hand of the European. He rightly deplores the idea that a possible "good" effect of colonialism was that it brought different peoples into "contact" and he also suggests that Nazism and colonialism should be seen not as separate phenomena but as forming a continuum.