Aimé Fernand David Césaire (26 June 1913 – 17 April 2008) was a French poet, author and politician from Martinique, being “one of the founders of the négritude movement in Francophone literature”. In 1945, with the support of the French Communist Party, Césaire was elected mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy to the French National Assembly for Martinique. He was one of the principal drafters of the 1946 law on departmentalizing former colonies, a role for which independentist politicians have often criticized him.
Like many left intellectuals in France, Césaire looked in the 1930s and 1940s toward the Soviet Union as a source of human progress, virtue, and human rights, but Césaire later grew disillusioned with Communism. In 1956, after the Soviet Union’s suppression of the Hungarian revolution, Aimé Césaire announced his resignation from the PCF in a text entitled “Lettre à Maurice Thorez”. In 1958 he founded the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais.
His writings during this period reflect his passion for civic and social engagement. He wrote “Discours sur le colonialisme” (Discourse on Colonialism) in 1950, a denunciation of European colonial racism, decadence, and hypocrisy that was republished in the French review Présence Africaine in 1955.
This work inspired Antoine from Echancrure to build up this 20 minutes long musical incursion into modern capitalist decadence. Read more Echancrure – Discours sur le colonialisme, EP (2012) ›