Black Orpheus, Fanon and the Négritude Movement

In Rethinking Existentialism, Jonathan Webber examines Fanon's engagement with the Negritude movement, focusing on his discussion in Black Skin, White Masks. A portion of Fanon's text discusses an interpretation of the movement advanced by Sartre in his essay ‘Black Orpheus’. Here, I raise some difficulties for what I will call Webber's ‘black agency’ reading of Fanon, before presenting an alternative. I argue that Fanon accepted certain important Negritude ideas, particularly Césaire's conception of a therapeutic method called the nekyia, and that this is crucial to understanding Fanon's response to Sartre.