Sartre Studies International

This volume brings together three scholarly reflections on the under-studied work of the French existentialist philosopher and anti-colonial activist Francis Jeanson (1922-2009), as well as publishing for the first time in English Jeanson's Preface to the first edition of Frantz Fanon's 1952 Black Skin, White Masks, and his postscript to the 1956 edition of that same work. In a separate article Kimberly Engles offers a proactive and original take on how Sartre's phenomenology might be used to understand reports of encounters with non-human intelligences.

This article presents a translation of Francis Jeanson's “Preface” to the first edition of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. Jeanson situates Fanon's work in relation to existentialism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. In addition, Jeanson attempts to overcome supposedly ‘colorblind’ objections to Fanon's antiracism. Finally, this preface presents a response to Fanon's criticisms of Jean-Paul Sartre's “Black Orpheus.”

This article is a translation of an excerpt from Francis Jeanson's postface to the 1965 edition of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. Jeanson reads Fanon's work in light of Algerian independence. He contends that Algerians have thrown off their colonial identity, though they have much work to do to construct a liberatory postcolonial polity. By contrast, the French have engaged in a form of historical amnesia.

This article introduces Francis Jeanson's “Preface” to the first edition (1952) of Black Skin, White Masks by examining how it situates Fanon's work in relation to liberal antiracism, existentialism, and Marxism. In the first section, I criticize Homi K. Bhabha's and Kwame Anthony Appiah's forewords to Black Skin, White Masks for vitiating the theoretical and practical grounds of Fanon's work. In the second section, I show how Jeanson critiques liberal antiracism, defends the revolutionary character of Fanon's work, and responds to Fanon's criticisms of Sartre's “Black Orpheus”—indeed, it is the only contemporary response to Fanon from within Sartre's inner circle. I conclude by examining how Jeanson fails to identify how whiteness, in an antiblack society, operates as false universality, when it is unmarked racial particularity.

Francis Jeanson (1922-2009) produced a number of books and articles about the economic and political situation in French-colonized Algeria, which accompanied his concrete political involvement in support of the Algerian national liberation struggle. He eventually offered his reinterpretation of his own political action, which goes hand in hand with his view of the role of the philosopher. This article looks at Jeanson's interpretations of this engagement, in order to explore the connections he made between political action and philosophy in practice as well as in theory. The concept of concrete solidarity provides a thread to move backward through his studies, statements, and recollections on Algeria, anti-colonialism, and democracy both within the metropole and in relation to its colony.

There are indeed few intellectual melees that have received as much literary attention, discursive scrutiny and historical research as the philosophical confrontation and socio-historical clash between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. And yet, Francis Jeanson, the radical existential thinker whose review of Camus’ The Rebel literally set the whole conflict in motion, rarely gets any serious thought devoted to his life or even his own work. Even with the rise of postcolonial studies and decolonial perspectives, Jeanson's militant trajectory from intellectual engagement to embrigadement during the Algerian Revolutionary War of Liberation from France still does not get the proper scholarly attention it deserves. As such, this paper will serve as an insurgent interrogation and philosophical introduction to the life and work of Francis Jeanson from an existential liberationist orientation.

Reported encounters with advanced non-human intelligences represent a growing body of perplexing and unexplainable experiences. While academic exploration of these encounters has historically been dominated by approaches that suggest these experiences exist in the mind alone, the climate may be shifting with the recent official acknowledgment of the existence of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). I examine encounters with alleged non-human intelligences (NHI) through the lens of Sartrean phenomenology. In a society that does not officially recognize non-human intelligences as “real” these encounters are existentially disruptive and often traumatic. In encounters that involve apparent NHI, subjects are faced with an Other who is unaccounted for and believed by mainstream society not to exist. Faced with an encounter with the seemingly impossible, experiencers undergo ontological shock, existential rupture, and abjection, questioning the boundaries of self, other, and the world. I conclude by giving suggestions for authentic existentialist responses to these alleged encounters.