SOURCE: Warner, Keith Q. “Les Nègres: A Look at Genet's Excursion into Black Consciousness.” College Language Association Journal 26, no. 4 (June 1983): 397-414.

In the following essay, Warner compares the characters in Les Nègres with black writers who sought to celebrate their ethnicity.

It is clear as one reads Les Nègres, published in English as The Blacks, that Jean Genêt has dealt extensively with the problem of black consciousness as it relates to the search for black identity as well as to the psychological expunging by blacks the world over of the imposition of usually Euro-centered values and the attendant problems posed by the unquestioned acceptance of the latter. Genêt's characters in this play set out, at one level, to do precisely what many black writers have done, namely to celebrate their blackness through a spiritual purging of the soul. These black writers were serious...