11
" Sartre’s preface was called “Orphée noire,” and it is directed at the white reader who stands on the brink of decolonization. “I want you to feel, as I do, the shock of being seen,” Sartre says. … For the white man has, for three thousand years, enjoyed the privilege of seeing without being seen. He was pure gaze … We, who were once divine-right Europeans, were already feeling our dignity crumbling beneath the gaze of the Americans and Soviets … At least we were hoping to recover a little of our grandeur in the menial eyes of the Africans. But there are no menial eyes any longer: there are wild, free gazes that judge our earth. 102 "
― Louis Menand , The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War