SOURCE: Connon, Derek F. “Confused? You Will Be: Genet's Les Nègres and the Art of Upsetting the Audience.” French Studies 50, no. 4 (October 1996): 425-38.

In the following essay, Connon discusses the role of the audience in The Blacks, focusing on Genet's direct implication of its racial composition and his intentional creation of discomfort.

Whilst Les Nègres is the play which Genet wrote to be performed by black actors, this is really the only sense in which it is a play written for blacks. In every other sense it is a play written against whites, even if Genet's double question ‘Qu'est-ce que c'est donc un noir? Et d'abord, c'est de quelle couleur?’¹ alerts us to the fact that the distinction between black and white is subject to symbolic as well as literal interpretation. Indeed, as J. P. Little puts it, by specifying that the intended public for the...