  Again, Sartre’s preface was a real kiss of death as it played an immense role in popularizing the Négritude movement and contributed to establishing Senghor’s Anthology as its manifesto, but at the same time dismissed its historical significance by emphasizing that its being was ultimately only poetic, without real  substance.[4]  And in fact, ironically, Black Orpheus contained and announced most of the criticisms that would be directed at Négritude afterwards. First the criticism which very quickly came from certain Marxists who accused Négritude of creating the distraction of “race” where there should be only a focus on objective social contradictions in the historic phase of the struggle of the Proletariat to bring authentic liberation to the oppressed workers in Europe and the dominated peoples in the  world.[5]   To that criticism some would add that by emphasizing the particular and the concrete of race over the objective and the universal of the struggle against capitalism and imperialism, the “fathers” of Négritude, Senghor more specifically (since he led his country to independence and became its president for twenty years), seemed to imply that some cultural recognition and reconciliation was all that was needed: they accused Négritude of being, for that reason, an ideology for neocolonialism. Sartre’s “preface” also foreshadowed the accusation of being an unfounded essentialism promoting the notion that black people shared a common identity, partaking in some enduring African-ness that defines them beyond differences in historical trajectories and circumstances, personal or collective.