[The following is excerpted from a translation of Jean-Paul Sartre's seminal essay on negritude, "Orphée Noir," which Sartre wrote as the introduction to Leopold Sédar-Senghor's Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (1948). The translation by John MacCombie first appeared in the Massachusetts Review in 1965.]

[If the poems in Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française] shame us …, they were not intended to: they were not written for us; and they will not shame any colonists or their accomplices who open this book, for these latter will think they are reading letters over someone's shoulder, letters not meant for them. These black men are addressing themselves to black men about black men; their poetry is neither satiric nor imprecatory: it is an awakening to consciousness. (p. 7)

[Race] consciousness is based first of all...