Race After Sartre (review)

With the build-up to the Obama victory putting questions surrounding race very much back on the agenda in the USA, and with debates about culture wars having been vigorously stoked up by the misdemeanours of the Bush administration, Jonathan Judaken's Race After Sartre is a timely new arrival. As Judaken reminds us in his lucid introduction, 'there are few figures who have had a greater influence on the critical theories applied to "race" and whose own praxis served so consistently to destabilize racial and colonial oppression' (p. 1). Though not a reference to current affairs, such a focus seems somewhat more than coincidentally apposite, not least because Sartre's commitment to radical Left critique was also unshakeable throughout much of his career, even if some might quibble with the claim that his interventions 'remain a model of Leftist politics in a globalized age' (p. 2). Race After Sartre is structured so as to offer both a chronological account of Sartre's thinking on race and colonialism and also critical appraisals of themes and areas of tension or uncharted common ground vis-à-vis the positions of other theorists or tendencies. All of Sartre's major preoccupations in this area are addressed, from antisemitism (Réflexions sur la question juive), anti-black racism (La Putain respectueuse), and the negritude movement in the 1940s through to his appraisal of colonialism as a systemic, institutionalized phenomenon, his support for the FLN in Algeria and ultimately his views on the 'new' racism in the 1970s. Following the predominantly chronological overview offered in Part 1, Christian Delacampagne's 'Race: From Philosophy to History' provides an illuminating introduction to the focus on antiracist theory in Part Two. Though Delacampagne's principal aim is to situate Sartre's writing on antisemitism in relation to the history of reflection on the matter, he argues that Sartre's concepts occupy a foundational role in race theory more broadly conceived, and also offers valuable observations about the contrasting ways in which 'race' is understood in the French and American contexts. A scholarly appraisal of Sartre's thought in relation to that of Levinas is offered by Robert Bernasconi who argues that a shared mistrust of Enlightenment universalism characterizes their opposition to racism. Lewis R. Gordon's 'Sartre and Black Existentialism' opens Part 3 devoted to Africana existentialism, and stresses not only Sartre's staunch opposition to anti-black racism but also his positive contribution to the development of the modes of thought and cultural forms of black African or African diasporic communities. Mabogo P. More, like many of the contributors to this volume, is keen to emphasize the importance of Sartre's thought for more recent or contemporary events, and, in an article that is undoubtedly one of the highlights of Race After Sartre, points to the common ground between the moral thinking of Sartre and that of South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko. If, for More, Sartrean thought 'contributed to the ultimate demise of the apartheid system' (p. 173), Richard Watts in Part 4 reminds us of its centrality to the postcolonial turn in critical theory, homing in notably on 'Orphée noir' and negritude before subjecting Glissant's rather un-Sartrean approach to preface writing to a rigorous examination.