Introduction

Summary

Writing in a state of shock following the killing of the US Black activist George Jackson in San Quentin prison in 1971, Jean Genet, who actively collaborated with the Black Panthers in the 1960s and early 70s, called on Western radicals to contest the mythologies on which White dominance was based. A colossal effort was needed, he insisted, to counter this hegemonic control: ‘we must learn to betray the Whites that we are’ [‘il faut apprendre à trahir les blancs que nous sommes’]. Genet's out-spokenness is unsurprising when we remember his well-established reputation as cultural dissident in France. The legacy of domination, he argues, disfigures those who perpetuate it. More noted for his use of the accusatory vous when addressing and castigating his Western bourgeois addressees, he employs the nous to underline and help shoulder, however momentarily, the burden of collective guilt surrounding racial injustice. This incitement to cultural self-betrayal regularly finds overdetermined expression in Genet, even if the extreme circumstances in which he is here writing help explain his forthrightness.

The call to collective self-scrutiny echoes a more general preoccupation with cultural self-image and value in modern French literature. The denigration of Europe by Camus's colonial-missionary protagonist in Le Renégat – ‘down with Europe, reason, honour, and the cross’ (EK, 44) [‘À bas l'Europe, la raison et l'honneur et la croix’] (TRN, 1590) – anticipates Genet's promotion of self-betrayal and pinpoints the strains inherent in Western supremacism.