Foreword Thought and Practice: Taking Stock, Re-engaging

Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous “Orphée noir” (1948) still ranks among the most memorable Prefaces aimed at capturing the significance of the moments of historical regeneration of interrupted cultural expressions. For that piece, simultaneously celebrated and controverted, Sartre borrowed the idea from the ancient Greek religious movement now widely referred to as “Orphism”, associated there with the mythical poet or singer, Orpheus, from about the 6th. Century B.C.E. The movement led to several mystery cults as well as to a theogony whose key objective was the poetic laudation of the birth, death, and re-birth of the gods. In the original Greek myth, and therefore in the sense that Sartre had hoped to apply to his revaluation of the novel Negritude poetry, the account begins with the idea of “night” as the primal entity from which a series of “kings” or gods springs?.