Der Salon Nardal, Re-enactments und Re-enchantments

In memory of the pioneers of the Négritude movement, the project explores what we can learn from their practices 100 years on.

A programme combining literature, poetry, dance, performance and music brings together historical and contemporary forms of the salon, exploring spaces for exchange, solidarity and shaping the future.

What emerges when we come together? In the 1920s and 1930s, Paulette Nardal and her sister Jeanne created one of the most influential meeting places for Black intellectuals during the interwar period. Their Salon Nardal was a hotbed of ideas, debates and cultural exchange. Through organised gatherings with writers, educators, artists and activists such as Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Léon-Gontran Damas, Suzanne Lacascade, René Maran, Léopold Senghor and many others, the Nardal sisters played a key role in establishing Paris as the intellectual centre of the Black world. However, whilst male figures such as Césaire and Senghor gained recognition as the founders of Négritude, the significance of the Nardal sisters in the movement’s emergence remained largely overlooked for a long time.

‘The Salon Nardal: Re-enactments and Re-enchantments’ revives the salon as a place of presence, collective thought and political imagination. Drawing on the work of the Nardal sisters, the project views the salon as a living practice. At a time of growing rejection of pluralism and dwindling spaces for dissent, the question of the salon as an infrastructure for collective thought takes on new urgency. Together with other diasporic gathering places in Abidjan, Berlin, Dakar, Douala, Fort-de-France and Paris, the project explores how communal spaces of self-determination and refuge can be created and sustained in the long term.

Featuring:

Jumoke Adeyanju, Lisa Anderson, Archive Books, Maisha-Maureen Auma, Vincent Bababoutilabo, Hemley Boum, Miriam Siré Camara, Edwige Dro, Brent Hayes Edwards, Simone Lagrand, Léa Mormin-Chauvac, Amandine Nana, Bisrat Negassi, Mame-Fatou Niang, Pascale Obolo, Élodie Paul, Ròt-Bò-Krik, Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Eric Otieno Sumba, Sónia Vaz Borges and others.

Programme