ABSTRACT
Jean-Paul Sartre could foresee that grappling with the issues of race and class simultaneously would be critical to the political future of France and of the African continent. In spite of his intuitive grasp of the literary and cultural origins of negritude, Sartre approached its philosophy and goals with contradictory impulses and agendas. Sartre’s discourse and dialectical reflections on black France and decolonization provide a solid philosophical basis for the recasting of negritude in the twenty-first century. His synthesis of a society without races, although it may be interpreted as including decolonization, appears to be a dialectical moment without a specific set of historical coordinates. The antinegritude movement coincided with the increasing push toward decolonization in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The society without races envisioned by Sartre is a utopian world in which racism, class cleavages, and colonialism have disappeared. This ideal state is the conclusion of Sartre’s dialectics of both negritude and colonialism.
