La negritudine come antidoto antropo-poetico all’alienazione linguistica dell’Occidente: riflessioni sull’Orphée noir di J.-P. Sartre

Abstract

Abstract – This chapter is intended as a critical re-reading of Orphée noir by Jean-Paul Sartre, which is an introduction, written by the French philosopher, to the anthology of French-speaking poets of the Third World, edited by L. Sedar Senghor, entitled: Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (1948). Analysing Sartre’s text again today has a dual theoretical importance regarding the alternative semantics needed to make sense of the diversity of the African culture, of ‘negritude’ which, in its ‘western’ meaning, has always stemmed from a vocabulary of white domination justifying the reduction of blacks to slaves, and which is also an inherent aesthetic energy of the poetic word, whose symbolic nature guarantees an understanding of the logical language of the ‘other’ who is defined as ‘wild’ by the restricted rationality of the functional western culture – and yet s/he is ‘deeply human’ insofar as s/he makes use of the imaginative and emotional language of the universal consciousness. The writings of Sartre seem to have no time limit when considering the topical relevance of his thought, which is open to the overcoming of every closed identity, including that of ‘negritude’ – which must be a liberating symbolic tradition to be abandoned, however, in the name of humanistic identity that is open to the recognition of the dignified condition of a human being from any culture, from any geo-historical area in the world. The objective of every culture, in fact, must be to liberalize the ‘human’ dimension of a human being tout-court, beyond every border and every tradition – History will decide which populations emancipate others in a particular period. Then, this task moves onto other nations, a pattern which repeats itself over time, which crosses the historical events of every human and humanistic process towards the goal of a conscious and democratically civil existence.