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martyr’ (this volume, p. 200). Sartre presents the Congo as a symbol hypostatizing the
destiny of Africa: ‘neocolonial countries were deciphering the mystification which had
released them from all their chains except over-exploitation’.
II
Although overlooked by critics in postcolonial studies, Sartre’s contribution to the debate
on colonialism is of great importance. The seminal work of this cultural critic and
political philosopher of the twentieth century informed the debate around decolonization,
and played a vital role in the emergence of major critics such as Césaire, Fanon and
Memmi. His work, in fact, provides insights without which it is difficult to grasp the
specific historical and cultural circumstances under which these critics were working.
Arguably, his interventions in Anti-Semite and Jew and Black Orpheus established a
critical terrain for the studies of these critics. What emerges from these two key texts is
the inextricable link between ethics and politics in his critiques of anti-Semitism, racism
and colonialism. His engagement with the colonial politics of the Fourth Republic in the
1950s, his two prefaces to Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized and Fanon’s The
Wretched of the Earth contained in this book, as well as his Critique of Dialectical
Reason, marked the fissuring of the grand narrative of Western Humanism and
anticipated its deconstruction.
So, the following questions impose themselves on us: why has Sartre been largely
excluded from the agenda of postcolonial criticism, and even when he was invoked, why
was it more often than not with the intention of revoking his contribution? Why were his
interventions in Colonialism and Neocolonialism consigned to oblivion? What were the
causes which effected this neglect and forgetting of Sartre? And why translate and
remember Sartre now at this moment? To attempt an answer to these questions, I need
first to examine Sartre’s interventions in Anti-Semite and Jew and Black Orpheus.
Though these two interventions emerge from two distinct ‘situations’, they shed some
light on this book and could help to reposition Sartre in the field of postcolonial criticism.
Sartre wrote Anti-Semite and Jew to expose the complicity of France in the Nazi
project. His aim was to grasp the discourses which produced and reproduced anti-
Semitism and which perpetrated and perpetuated genocide. He adumbrates the portraits
of four major protagonists involved in the drama of anti-Semitism: the anti-Semite, the
democrat, the inauthentic and the authentic Jew. The anti-Semite constructs the Jew. The
democrat loves the Jew as a human being but annihilates the Jew in his/her specificities
as a Jew. The inauthentic Jew reproduces either the anti-Semitism of the anti-Semite or
the humanist and universalizing rhetoric of the democrat that wipes out the very
difference defining the Jewishness of the Jew. In other words, the inauthentic Jew either
reproduces him/herself through the gaze of the anti-Semite that ghettoizes and prevents
the integration of the Jew or seeks to assimilate him/herself into a cultural universe that
denies the difference of the Jew. Inauthenticity is the outcome of a situation that
perpetrates racism and the objective murder of the Jew. The authentic Jew accepts his/her
situation as a Jew and does not seek ‘avenues of flight’ 19 or attempt to overcome this
situation by constructing a Jewish state.