Abstract
Genet’s interest in blacks, dating from his prison days, has always taken the form of a strong emotional bond: ‘What makes me feel so very close to them is the hatred they bear for the white world; a hatred comparable to my own for the world that scorned me because I was a bastard, with no father and no mother’. ‘Perhaps I am a black man who happens to have white or pink skin. I don’t know my family’.1
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References
The first quotation comes from Démeron’s ‘Interview’, p. 99. The second is taken from Fichte’s ‘Interview’, p. 180.
‘To a Would-Be Producer’, Tulane Drama Review, 7, 3 (1963), p. 80.
For a comparison between Genet and Baraka see Kimberly W. Benston, Baraka: the Renegade and the Mask (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 213–17; 234–6.
See ‘Ronald Bryden discusses The Blacks — and the new Mortimers’, The Observer (1 February 1970), p. 28.
Doug Arthur, ‘The Blacks by Jean Genet’, Educational Theatre Journal, 25, 3 (1972), p. 315.
William L. Tribby, ‘The Blacks by Jean Genet’, Educational Theatre Journal, 25, 4 (1973), p. 513.
This diagram is taken from my article, ‘The Blacks by Jean Genet: A Dimensional Approach’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 10, 2 (1973).
The quotations from Césaire used in the following development are taken from An Interview with Aimé Césaire by René Depestre, in A. Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism ; those from Fanon come from Black Skin, White Masks.
See Présence africaine, 16 (December 1957), p. 164.
Anthony Graham-White, ‘Jean Genet and the Psychology of Colonialism’, Comparative Drama, 4, 3 (1970). I am greatly indebted to this article, the first to underline the relation between Genet and the movement of Négritude.
Aimé Césaire, Return to my Native Land, p. 96. This book was first published in 1947 and undoubtedly known to Genet.
Graham Dunstan Martin, ‘Racism in Genet’s Les Nègres‘, The Modern Language Review, 70, 3 (1975). I owe a great deal to this article which stresses the psychology of racism especially in the Southern United States.
Lewis T. Cetta, Profane Play, Ritual, and Jean Genet, pp. 67–8.
June Schlueter, Metafictional Characters in Modern Drama, p. 47.
Peter Brook, The Empty Space, p. 152. See the notions of ‘répétition‘ and ‘représentation‘, pp. 154–5.
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© 1983 Jeannette L. Savona
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Savona, J.L. (1983). ‘The Blacks’: Play-Acting as the Black Man’s Burden. In: Jean Genet. Macmillan Modern Dramatists. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-86090-6_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-86090-6_5
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