St. Mark's Bookshop

Jean Paul Sartre s writings on race and postcoloniality in the 1950s informed the debates around decolonization at a time when France was involved in bitter struggles in Algeria. Sartre was one of the first thinkers to deal with the ethics of difference and the first to critique colonial narratives. In effect, he established a critical terrain for postcolonial theorizing that was to have a lasting influence on the work of Fanon, Cisaire, Memmi and Saod.Sartre's writings on the construction of "otherness," and his work in anti-Semite and Jew, for example, had a direct impact on both Fanon and Cisaire in their work on the culture of colonialism. Sartre's preface to Fanon's Wretched of the Earth marked the fissuring of one of the grand narratives of Western Humanism. While his introduction to Memmi's The Colonizer and the Colonized characterized colonialism as a profoundly racist imposition that could only be fully understood as part of an ongoing imperialist project whereby colonized peoples were systematically reduced to the status of object. Haddour's work is a superb introduction to the work of key French thinkers and writers on the colonial project and on the continuing demonization of the former colonized peoples in our postcolonial world.