What Color is Black: Epistemic Disobedience in Jean Genet’s The Blacks

Abstract

Jean Genet’s writing has generated controversies over the years, particularly his advocacy for demoting whiteness and its means of domination. He is primarily regarded as an angry homosexual white French male who portrays grotesque shadows of humanity in his work. In his 1959 Play The Blacks, Genet describes the way Blacks are categorized in France through the mediation of abjecting politics of disgust, which cast black bodies as repulsive and outside the pole. At the same time, The Blacks considers the strategies of resistance and critique that are available to these bodies and those working alongside with them. Characters in The Blacks conform to the roles that they are given, therefore creating a visual mask over their identity. For Genet acting becomes a (positively) perverse and subversive mean for gaining power over oppression by taking an art from something that is traditionally based in strict role playing and turning it into a form of individual and collective expression necessary to “negatively” creating what can then be conceived as an assertively “positive” socio-political identity.