Sartre’s imaginary and the problem of whiteness

2021 ◽  
pp. 019145372110175
Author(s):  
Betty Jean Stoneman
Keyword(s):  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
White People ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Political Act ◽  
White Gaze

Jean-Paul Sartre’s failures in Black Orpheus have been widely and rightly explicated by a number of theorists, most notably Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. Sartre has rightly been criticized for imposing a white gaze onto his reading of colonized African poetry. It would seem that his work offers us no tools for anti-racist work today. For this article, I read his failures in the text alongside his work in The Imaginary and Being and Nothingness to argue that we can learn from his failures and that his failures do offer us conceptual tools for anti-racist work today. I argue that Sartre’s main contribution ought to be understood as a provocation to white people. He is provoking white people to confront how whiteness works in their imaginary. The imaginary is nothing but what one puts into it, and what one puts into it is imbued with the historical, social and cultural. The image is imbued with the individual’s experiences within a historical, social and cultural situation. If this is the case, then the confrontation with and critique of the image is a political act. In confronting and critiquing the image, one is confronting and critiquing the situation in which the image emerges. The hope is that in doing so, white people could transcend the facticity of their whiteness in particular situations for the better, which in turn would have positive consequences for the larger sociopolitical situation.

Spirit of Bandung beyond Colonial Mobility

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-209
Author(s):  
Jeong Eun Annabel We
Keyword(s):  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
Ernst Bloch ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Liberal Humanism ◽  
Current Paradigm

This article argues that the spirit of Bandung’s relevance in a time of resurgent fascist mobilization is in the new logic of movement that the 1955 Afro-Asian conference in Bandung, Indonesia espoused. The critiques of liberal humanism and its relation to fascism by Ernst Bloch, Takeuchi Yoshimi, and Aimé Césaire reveal that an underlying problem of coloniality and movement remain in current paradigm of liberalism. The article situates conceptual reworkings of colonial-fascist movement by the thinkers Takeuchi Yoshimi, Frantz Fanon, and Ch’oe In-Hun within the trajectory of the spirit of Bandung. Through this engagement, the article argues that the spirit of Bandung has called for revolutionary movement beyond the grids of colonial mobility in the transpacific.

scholarly journals Black Orpheus and Aesthetic Historicism

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-135
Author(s):  
Marina Paola Banchetti-Robino
Keyword(s):  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Novel Approach

This essay offers a novel approach for understanding the poetry of negritude and its role in the struggle for black liberation by appealing to Giambattista Vico’s insights on the historical, cultural, and myth-making function of poetry and of the mythopoetic imagination.  The essay begins with a discussion of Vico’s aesthetic historicism and of his ideas regarding the role of imagination, poetry, and myth-making and then brings these ideas to bear on the discussion of the function of negritude poetry, focusing primarily on the writings of Aimé Césaire and on Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay, Black Orpheus.

scholarly journals Le Mai 68 littéraire de François Maspero

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julien Lefort-Favreau
Keyword(s):  
Prise En Charge ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
Georges Perec ◽  
Louis Althusser ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Creation Litteraire

Si l’importance des éditions François Maspero dans les champs politique et intellectuel a été bien démontrée par de nombreux travaux récents, son apport aux mutations survenues dans les politiques de la littérature autour de Mai 68 mérite d’être mis en lumière. Nous soumettons l’hypothèse que l’action de François Maspero en amont et en aval de 68 participe à une politisation du champ littéraire par l’articulation complexe entre théorie politique et création littéraire que l’on peut observer dans l’ensemble de son catalogue. Nous nous intéressons ici à quatre acceptions de la littérature qui circulent chez Maspero et qui incarnent les différentes facettes d’une inscription conflictuelle de la littérature dans l’espace social représentative de 68. Nous portons d’abord notre attention sur les préfaces que signe Jean-Paul Sartre de deux livres publiés par Maspero : Aden Arabie de Paul Nizan et Les damnés de la terre de Frantz Fanon. Nous analysons ensuite une série d’articles de Georges Perec qui paraît au début des années 1960 dans la revue Partisans. La troisième acception que nous observons est perceptible dans les collections consacrées à la création littéraire chez Maspero, notamment à la poésie en traduction. Finalement, notre analyse porte sur la collection « Théorie » dirigée par Louis Althusser et la réflexion qu’elle déploie sur les tensions entre art et idéologie. L’examen de ces quatre déclinaisons du littéraire montre que Maspero constitue le lieu privilégié d’une prise en charge de paroles subalternes provenant du Tiers-Monde, d’une critique virulente des prescriptions esthétiques du PCF et d’un éloignement des principes de la littérature engagée. Il annonce donc des transformations importantes de 1968 et les pérennise au fil des années 1970.

The Last Muslim Intellectual

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hamid Dabashi
Keyword(s):  
Liberation Theology ◽  
Wide Spectrum ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Intellectual Biography ◽  
Dead End ◽  
Urgent Task

The first comprehensive social and intellectual biography of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, this book explores the life and legacy of Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923-69), arguably the most prominent Iranian public intellectual of his time and contends that he was the last Muslim intellectual to have articulated a vision of Muslim worldly cosmopolitanism, before the militant Islamism of the last half a century degenerated into sectarian politics and intellectual alienation from the world at large. This unprecedented engagement with Al-e Ahmad’s life and legacy is a prelude to what Dabashi calls a post-Islamist Liberation Theology. The Last Muslim Intellectual is about expanding the wide spectrum of anticolonial thinking beyond its established canonicity and adding a critical Muslim thinker to it is an urgent task, if the future of Muslim critical thinking is to be considered in liberated terms beyond the dead-end of its current sectarian predicament. A full social and intellectual biography of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, a seminal Muslim public intellectual of the mid-20th century, this book places Al-e Ahmad’s writing and activities alongside other influential anticolonial thinkers of his time, including Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and Edward Said. Chapters cover Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s intellectual and political life; his relationship with his wife, the novelist Simin Daneshvar; his essays; his fiction; his travel writing; his translations; and his legacy.

Toward a Multicultural Ethics and Decolonial Meta-Identity in the Work of Fernando Sylvan

2018 ◽  
pp. 106-144
Author(s):  
Daniel F. Silva
Keyword(s):  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
European American ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Enrique Dussel

This chapter seeks to flesh out Sylvan’s stance against Empire by interfacing his essayistic production with his poetry. For instance, in his O Racismo da Europa e a Paz no Mundo, written during the heightened period of anti-colonial struggle in Africa and Asia, Sylvan offers a theorization and cursory genealogy of European and European-American global hegemony, ranging from the European historicization of itself as ‘the standard civilization,’ the fantasy of European superiority, and its resignification of difference in order to retain the balance of global power. This chapter thus contextualizes Sylvan’s anti-imperial thought with that of postcolonial and decolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Enrique Dussel; in addition to elaborating the points where Sylvan’s thought further problematizes and contributes to the theorization of contemporary global power.

scholarly journals América Latina

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Cristian Paula Santana ◽  
Leoné Astride Barzotto
Keyword(s):  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
America Latina

Este artigo tem por intuito refletir sobre a região do globo denominada América Latina bem como sua identidade manifestada pela Negritude nestes tempos atuais de globalização. Para tanto, dialogaremos com teóricos como Aimé Césaire e Frantz Fanon para discutir as questões da Negritude, e com Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo e Emir Sader, teóricos latino-americanos que teorizam e produzemsaberes pela perspectiva da margem.

Literary Primitivism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Etherington
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
Alain Locke ◽  
Primitive Forms ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
Carl Einstein

This book comprehensively redefines literary primitivism, arguing that it was an aesthetic project formed in reaction to the high point of imperialist expansion at the start of the twentieth century. As those spaces in which “primitive” forms of existence were imagined to be possible were either directly colonized or otherwise forcibly integrated into a geographically totalized capitalist world-system, so dissenting writers responded by trying to reawaken primitive experience by means of literary practice. This thesis breaks with the orthodox understanding of primitivism as a transhistorical tendency according to which the “civilized” idealize the “primitive,” something that is usually thought to correspond to a binary of the “West” and its “Others.” Adopting the “point of view of totality,” Literary Primitivism argues that it was artists from peripheral societies who most energetically pursued primitivism’s project of immediacy as it was they who most keenly felt the loss of unalienated social worlds. The major debates are reviewed concerning primitivism and the thinkers, artists, and concept--including expressionism, modernism, surrealism, Rousseau, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Luxemburg, the writers of négritude, Carl Einstein, the Frankfurt School, and Alain Locke. In close studies of the work of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, D. H. Lawrence, and Claude McKay the book identifies a morphology of literary primitivism that centers on the literary activation of the primitive remnant. Along the way, the book reassesses the politics of primitivism, especially with regard to its decolonial horizon, and the prospects for understanding literary primitivism as an event of world literature.

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