Jean Genet and Colonialism Indrani Sen UCH literature often of great value has grown out of the colonial M experience both in the West and in the Third World. Facets of colonialism have been explored in the works of several modern writers as diverse as E.M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, V.S. Naipaul, and Ruth Prawer Jhabwalla who have probed the East-West interactions, the cultural and economic implications and the moral question raised by colonialism. Jean Genet's last two plays. The Blacks (1957) and The Screens (1961) deal with the problem of colonial oppression in its pyschological and political dimensions. The colonial context is bom out of the forcible occupation and domination of lands by foreign peoples; for Genet the relationships it perpetrates are those of master and slave; consequently what interests him most is the period of revolt when a colonised people throw out their foreign masters by violent political action. The East-West interactions in Genets view can only be antagonistic, constituting conflict and confrontation, never reconciliation. Suffering oppression and rejected by society because of his illegitimate birth. Genet has always remained a social outcast, pursuing a criminal career and championing the cause of the oppressed including that of the Black Panthers, and recently, that of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in his crusade against what he considers decadent Western society. His position of extreme revolt against the bourgeoisie and his commitment to evil in a world where, to his mind, the term "good" has become a misnomer for moral decadence earned him the title of "Saint Genet" from Jean-Paul Sartre. Journal of Arts and Ideas 85