Martinican poet, playwright, essayist, and politician — co-founder, with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon-Gontran Damas, of the négritude movement, mayor of Fort-de-France for fifty-six years (1945–2001), deputy in the French National Assembly for forty-eight, and among the most consequential 20th-century black anticolonial thinkers. Educated at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in the 1930s, Césaire encountered there both the Harlem Renaissance writers (via Jane and Paulette Nardal's salon) and the African students with whom he would shape a concept — négritude — that insisted on black civilizational particularity against French assimilationist universalism.
His long poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 1939; revised 1947, 1956) is the founding text of the movement — a sustained return to Martinique as poetic act, refusing the French education's claim that civilization was elsewhere. Discourse on Colonialism (Discours sur le colonialisme, 1950) is the essential political statement: a furious, aphoristic attack on European colonialism as a moral and political catastrophe, and — the book's still-provocative move — as the true source of the barbarism Europe later inflicted on itself in the form of Nazism. "Hitler," Césaire wrote, applied to Europe what Europe had already been applying to the colonized world for four centuries. The argument placed colonial violence at the center of any honest account of 20th-century European history.
Frantz Fanon was Césaire's student at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France; the two remained in close intellectual relation even as Fanon eventually pushed past Césaire's position toward a sharper theory of colonial violence and its psychic costs. Césaire's 1956 Letter to Maurice Thorez, breaking publicly with the French Communist Party over its silence on colonial racism, is one of the major 20th-century documents of black radical politics. His three great plays — The Tragedy of King Christophe, A Season in the Congo, A Tempest (a rewriting of Shakespeare's from Caliban's point of view) — dramatize the central figures of a black Atlantic political history.