Civilization
Césaire uses civilization in his essay Culture and Colonization to describe the over-arching link between different groupings of cultures, the “great cultural families” that “are grouped by affinities.” He explains: “there is a French national culture, an Italian, English, Spanish, German, Russian national culture, etc....” which “display among them, alongside real differences, a certain number of striking resemblances which make it the case that if one can speak of national cultures particular to each of the countries that I have just listed, one can just as much speak of a European civilization.” (128) Similarly, he believes there is a ‘Negro-African’ civilization that connects Africa and its Diaspora. This conception of civilization accounts for cultural difference within it, and in its historical conception of Negro-Afircan groups is the basis for vertical solidarity.
Césaire argues mixed civilizations cannot exist under colonial conditions - “no colonizing country can lavish its civilization on any colonized country,” (135) and giving and borrowing is impossible in unequal civilizational contact. Free cultural exchanges are possible, provided they take place on equal terms and the receiving culture autonomously chooses to incorporate particular foreign elements
Quotes:
“I think it is quite true that the only culture is national culture. But it is immediately apparent that national cultures, as particular as they are, are grouped by affinities. And these great cultural relationships, these great cultural families, have a name: they are civilizations” (128)
“This is to say that civilization and culture define two aspects of a single reality: civilization marks the perimeter of culture, its most exterior and general aspects, whereas culture in its turn constitutes the intimate and radiant kernel of a civilization, its most singular aspect.” (129)
“The French sociologist Marcel Mauss defines civilization as “an ensemble of phenomena of civilization that are sufficiently large, sufficiently numerous, sufficiently important in both quality and quantity. It is also a fairly large ensemble of societies which present these phenomena.” We can infer from this definition that civilization tends to universality while culture tends to particularity: that culture is civilization as it is proper to a people, to a nation, shared by no other, and that it carries the indelible mark of that people or nation.” (128)
“There is no better way to say that civilization is never so particular that it does not imply and invigorate an entire constellation of ideational resources, of traditions, of beliefs, of ways of thinking, of values, an entire intellectual toolkit, an entire emotional complex, an entire wisdom that is precisely what we call culture.” (129)
"What is civilization, though, if not a harmony and a whole? It is because culture is not just a simple juxtaposition of cultural features that there cannot be a mixed culture [une culture métisse]. I do not mean that people who are biologically mixed [métisse] cannot found a civilization. I mean that the civilization they found will only be a civilization if it is not mixed. And it is for this reason as well that one of the characteristics of culture is style, that is, that mark proper to a people and an era, which is to be found in all fields in which the activity of that people is manifested at a given period. It seems to me that what Nietzsche says in this regard deserves to be taken into consideration: “Culture is, above all, unity of artistic style in all the expression of the life of a people. Much knowledge and learning is neither an essential means to culture nor a sign of it, and if needs be can get along very well with the opposite of culture, barbarism, which is lack of style or a chaotic jumble of all styles.”18" (138)