I’ll only say a few words about French-Caribbean Aimé Cesairé’s masterful surrealist essay. This is a very important text that is largely overlooked. It deconstructs the psyche of colonialist savagery, slashes the wrist of bourgeoisie apathy, and somehow manages to inspire hope at the same time. Originally published in 1950, Discourse’s warnings about the unsurpassed “barbarism of the United States” still hold true today, as can be seen in the insatiable neoliberal quest for global domination. This essay is both a bullet and a band aid, scholarly analysis and creative explosion. You can read the text in full here, but I’ll leave you with an excerpt:

“that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it; legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples…it is the crime of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the ‘niggers’ of Africa.”

Robin D.G. Kelley wrote a wonderful introduction entitled, “A Poetics of Anticolonialism,” and I highly recommend that as well because it offers a lot of helpful insight while also providing historical context for the essay. You can buy an edition that includes both pieces of writing on Amazon.