Sartre saw black poetry as reversing the oppressive colonial gaze

Evidence

As long ago as 1948, he had written an essay called ‘Black Orpheus’, originally published as the preface to Léopold Senghor’s Anthology of New Black and Malagasy Poetry. Sartre there described how poetry by black and postcolonial writers often reversed the fixing, judging ‘gaze’ of their oppressors. From now on, he said, white Europeans can no longer coolly assess and master the world. Instead, ‘these black men are looking at us, and our gaze comes back to our own eyes; in their turn, black torches light up the world and our white heads are no more than Chinese lanterns swinging in the wind’. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 863

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates Sartre’s concept of the ‘gaze’ (regard) in its applied, anti-colonial form, showing how the concept functions rather than just being defined abstractly.
• XREF: Connects to Beauvoir’s ‘myths of femininity’ analysis and to Memmi’s colonial portraits mentioned in the next paragraph — Beauvoir and Sartre’s shared method of analyzing how oppressors construct the Other. — connects to: Sartre relativized negritude at a moment when Black consciousness needed absoluteness; Sartre’s relativizing destroyed black Americans’ zeal collectively — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 512; Reading European literature leads the black colonial subject to enslave himself (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Sartre relativized negritude at a moment when Black consciousness needed absoluteness #complicates (0.85)
• Sartre’s relativizing destroyed black Americans’ zeal collectively #complicates (0.80) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 512
• Sartre sees the Other’s gaze as falsifying essence-free being #expands (0.80) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 632
• Negritude affirmed diasporic black solidarity across colonial and postcolonial geographies #complicates (0.75) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 344
• Sartre wrote The Flies as a freedom allegory for occupied France #expands (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 510
• Sartre equated writing with living itself #expands (0.72) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 969
• Surrealist method could reach a pre-colonial black self beneath French acculturation #expands (0.72) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 291
• Reading European literature leads the black colonial subject to enslave himself #expands (0.70)