Race After Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism (review)

With this volume, Jonathan Judaken has positioned Sartre as a major contributor to postcolonial theory and critical race studies. Not only do these authors deftly critique Sartre’s writings on racism and colonialism, but they write within a distinctly Sartrean methodology of littérature engagée, in which writing directly relates to a specific human condition or situation in order to promote social change. Judaken and his fellow contributors set out to remind us that Sartre was a tireless advocate for human freedom and a potent voice against oppression. Through interrelated responses, the ten authors in this collection address the dearth of scholarly work on Sartre as a critic of racism, colonialism, and anti-semitism; furthermore, they intricately negotiate the controversies produced by Sartre’s writings on racism and colonialism, which instigated heated criticisms.

One concomitance these articles share is an analysis of Sartre’s four key prefaces to the following works: Leopold Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, titled “Orphée Noir,” Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre, Albert Memmi’s seminal text Portrait du colonisé précédé de portrait du colonisateur and Patrice Lumumba’s Discours de Lumumba, Lumumba et le néo-colonialisme. The articles also commonly address Sartre’s seminal article, Réflexions sur la question juive.

Our late Johns Hopkins University professor Christian Delacampagne made an invaluable contribution to this volume, “Race: From Philosophy to History,” as one of his last published works. In his philosophical and cultural study of the ways in which understandings of race diverge in France and the U.S., his reflections on translation’s negative impact on semantics of race and racism in Europe and the United States are pertinent today. Delacampagne offers a succinct and lucid analysis of Sartre’s main points on anti-Semitism, tracing Sartre’s evolution of thought starting from his article Réflexions sur la question juive in 1946 to the end of his career. Delacampagne’s essay will interest students of the European intellectual history of anti-Semitism, given his discussion of Jaspers, Bartolomé de las Casas, Montaigne, and Arendt. It will also interest historians, since Delacampagne foregrounds the historical role of the Catholic Church in both the origins and influence of anti-Judaism in Europe. Delacampagne effectively summarizes the main tenets of Sartre’s critique of anti-Semitism, which include situating race as a social construct, that racism and anti-Semitism are falsely-based ideologies, and lastly that the human community must fight against racism. However, Delacampagne does not hesitate to point out the anti-Semitic currents in Sartre’s writing. “The Jew that the anti-Semite wants to reach is not a schematic being, defined only through his position as in administrative law; through his position or through his actions as within the Code. He’s a Jew, a son of Jews, recognizable through his physical features, his hair color, his clothes and perhaps, as they say, his character” (103). Delacampagne correctly labels this a “terrifying slip of the tongue” on Sartre’s part since Sartre evokes stereotyping. Delacampagne suggests that in spite of his progressive leanings, Sartre was affected by social prejudices of the twenties and thirties and that his knowledge of racism and Judaism was paltry. I laud Delacampagne for writing that one should deplore Sartre’s mistakes, even though I argue that Sartre is to blame for them, particularly given his stress on an individual’s responsibility. Delacampagne ultimately underscores that Sartre was the first one to convey that anti-Semitism was not an opinion but was a global attitude, both an ideology and a secular religion. We are fortunate to have this last important work from Christian Delacampagne.

In Jonathan Judaken’s article, “Sartre on Racism: From Existential Phenomenology to Globalization and ‘the New Racism’” he astutely connects the unrest in Paris during the riots of 2005 to Sartre’s response to a police officer killing an immigrant in 1973, in what he...