Assess Cesaire’s claim (in Discourse on Colonialism) that Hitler’s ‘scientific’ racism was the outcome and application to Europe of “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”

Question: Assess Cesaire’s claim (in Discourse on Colonialism) that Hitler’s ‘scientific’ racism was the outcome and application to Europe of “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”

structure: There are two key elements in a good answer to this question- one, a discussion of scientific racism; and two, an evaluation of the claim that the racism of the Nazi’s was not fundamentally different from racism in the colonial sphere, and indeed, had its roots in the latter (note that this claim is made not only by Cesaire but also Fanon and Sartre). The two elements are of course connected, and making those connections well will be a sign of a good essay. Cesaire’s claim, while highly suggestive, is not easy to ‘prove’, but there is now literature (much of it relatively recent) which seeks to explore this claim empirically by examining German colonialism to trace any connections there might be between German colonial ideology and practices, and subsequent Nazi racism and genocide.