Firebrands and Battle Plans: Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and G. W. F. Hegel

Abstract

Jean-Paul Sartre in his “Black Orpheus” wrote: “[B]ecause he is oppressed in and as a result of his race, it is first his race of which [the Black man] must be aware. He must compel those who for centuries, vainly tried to reduce him to a beast, because he was black to recognize him as a man.” ¹ Black poetry, of which rap is a particularly relevant twenty-first-century example, has, since hiphop’s birth, demanded recognition for Black artists—indeed, all Black people—as subjective identities. Just as Sartre recognized the figure of the Black poet who would “tear Blackness out of himself in order to offer it to the world,” ² so does hip-hop unashamedly offer to the world its own beautiful Blackness, carrying on the proud tradition of Black expression that was begun when the formerly colonized and the formerly enslaved began poeticizing their feelings in the language of their oppressors. Crucially, such expressions of Blackness and selfhood did not demand a place at the table next to enslavers and colonizers; rather, they established a counter discourse through which Black voices could contend not only with racism and colonialism, but also with racist underpinnings of the very language itself. Hip-hop is a continuation of this practice. As James Spady says, hip-hop—Black in its poetics, its politics, its codes, and its rhythms—“mediates the corrosive discourse of the dominating society while at the same time function[ing] as a subterranean subversion.”³