Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism

a key to decolonial Latin American feminist reading

Abstract

In this paper, the Colombian anthropologist Mara Viveros analyzes the importance and sagacity of Aimé Césaire's “Discourse on colonialism”, pointing to the Martinican author as an emblem of the anti-racist and anti-colonial conscience in the world. At the same time that the author exposes the relevance of the Discourse on colonialism for the Afro-Latin American world and contemporary Latin American feminist descolonial projects, she points out the omission in Césaire's work of issues that today we would call gender. The text is organized in three parts: the first goes through the author's proposal focusing on his acute and prophetic response, on behalf of the colonized peoples, to the project of European civilization. Secondly, it deals with the tensions posed by the demands for equality that recognizes the differences exposed by the author and, finally, suggests several elements of Césaire's theoretical-political proposal that could be useful to Latin American feminist movements, especially descolonial and anti-racist feminisms.