Enlightenment, Racism and the Black Radical Tradition. Forty Years after Le Code Noir ou le calvaire de Canaan by Louis Sala-Molins

In Le Code Noir ou le calvaire de Canaan, Louis Sala-Molins not only exhumes and comments on this legal text designed to regulate slavery, but also confronts the philosophy of the Enlightenment with the reality of imperialism. Sala-Molins raises the problem of the inability of the Enlightenment to rid itself of a certain form of racism and reveals its propensity, for most of the time, to conceal the transatlantic slave trade, slavery and colonialism and, sometimes, to condemn them only weakly and partially. But what kind of racism is meant exactly? And what kind of Enlightenment are we speaking of? Too little attention has been paid to these questions in Sala-Molins’s work. We propose here to examine Sala-Molins’s theoretical position, and to highlight its critical significance, based on a specific case – that of the theme of the “black Spartacus”, which runs through several Enlightenment texts – while sketching out a few critical avenues aimed at identifying possible avenues for future thinking. Almost forty years after the work in question, we need to consider the Enlightenment from an external point of view to the hiding of which it has up till now contributed: that of African traditions of politics and thought, which are introduced here using the notion of “black radical tradition”.