"An angry essay on racism", Le corps noir by Jean-Claude Charles is a necessary work. Le corps noir approaches the black question with intelligence, humor and sometimes irony. Jean-Claude Charles develops here the way in which the black body was invented. The book deals in particular with fantasies of difference, the myths of black nationalism, the memory of the slave, the relationship between France and immigrants, the alphabetical journey of the black body... Accompanied by illustrations, iconographies and testimonies.

Jean-Claude Charles opens up unique perspectives by questioning the myth of the black body. An essential read to better understand the black condition.

Here begins an attempt to grasp what is called "the black question" - and which will have to be renamed. From several ends at once. Including, above all, the most distant apparently. From an obligatory obsessive thread: the macabre carnival of the shopkeepers of negritude always ready to brandish their "specificities" in a uniform rustling of checks, a tom-tom of transnational capital. A noise of death to which the West can remain deaf, since it lives, asserts itself at this price. Black misery would not be white misery? A black corpse would not be a white corpse?

Of the black body as invention. Of the black body as an object of exchange. These are the two articulations of this reflection on the deposits of stereotypes, of fantasies about Blacks – in which it turns out that Blacks themselves participate with talent; through the multiple bodies that the eye of the master would like to unify and folklorize in the relentless work of ethnic alteration; also through, cut up, scattered, my own body, its conflicts, its dispersion. At its own risk.

Born in 1949 in Port-au-Prince and died in Paris in 2008, Jean-Claude Charles, novelist, poet, essayist and journalist, is the author of an immense body of work, republished by Mémoire d'encrier.