Black body, brillant considerations, cultural opacities

The title of Jean-Claude Charles's essay, Le Corps noir, looks like an enigma. On the one hand, he designates an object that the explanation fails to take charge; on the other, he seems only a fragile screen against racist prejudices. In a writing which chooses the step aside and the shift from the current argumentation, Jean-Claude Charles highlights the different linguistic and pictorial forms and constructions by which the racist imagination is carried back into the Western context. Finally, it seems that he offers cultural elements in the text whose interpretation is complex, presumably to lead his readers to pursue by themselves the questions he leaves open. However, we note that the blind spot from which these questions originate remains the Haitian space anchored in memory : that of childhood.