Skip to main content

After the end of the Second World War, the two pioneers of the Négritude movement, Paulette and Jane Nardal, returned to Martinique. There, they became involved in local feminist movements and founded the magazine *La Femme dans la Cité* (Women in the City, 1945–50).


Author Amandine Nana’s poetic gesture takes as its starting point the idea of a ‘new Eve’ who is ‘black and beautiful’: ‘Eve nouvelle / Noire et belle’. The two sisters first coined this expression in 1945 in their poem ‘Ecoute…’, which was published in the first issue of *La Femme dans la Cité*.


Long before the slogan ‘Black is Beautiful’ emerged in the USA in the early 1960s, Jane and Paulette had begun to decolonise and reframe notions of beauty and Blackness in their writings. Nana’s poetic gesture brings the sisters’ work into dialogue with historical and speculative iconographic research and opens up a Black feminist reflection that engages with the aesthetic politics of the Nardal sisters’ Négritude.


The project places the aesthetic and political question of Black beauty—and its endeavour to restore the humanity and cultural identity of the Black subject—at the centre of the history of Négritude.


  • In French and English
Additional information
Dates
November 2026
MoTuWeThFrSaSu
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30