What Remains of Jean Genet?

This essay argues that Jean Genet's critique of racism in his play The Blacks shares with his contemporaneous art theory an idealist subordination of historical particularities to what exceeds or endures beyond such particularities. Reading "The Studio of Alberto Giacometti" and "The Strange Word of . . . " together with The Blacks illuminates some otherwise cryptic images of death and ruins in the play and, in the process, indicates the distance between Genet's frequent recourse to the figure of remains in protesting social injustice throughout the late 1950s and early '60s, and subsequent multiculturalist efforts to critique racism through the historical contextualization and defense of diversity.