Les Sœurs Nardal: Ésprits insubmersibles de la Négritude

In her keynote lecture, Tracey Sharpley-Whiting situates Paulette and Jane Nardal within the context of the 1930s, at the intersection of the intellectual and political worlds in the Caribbean, Paris, Africa and the USA. She situates the Nardals within the Black internationalist networks of the interwar period and examines them against the backdrop of the alliances formed at that time for the purpose of mutual exchange.

This includes, amongst other things, their encounters with Eslanda Goode Robeson, whose writings on ‘Black Paris’ and on Paulette Nardal conveyed the substance of the discussions held there to the African-American intellectual world.

The renewed engagement with the Nardal sisters in the late 20th and early 21st centuries underscores what these earlier encounters already suggested: Black feminist thought emerged largely through travel, translation, correspondence, encounters and the exchange of ideas across the entire ‘Black Atlantic’.

In the second keynote lecture, Mame-Fatou Niang views the Nardal sisters not as figures awaiting rediscovery, but as the creators of an intellectual approach that remains strikingly relevant today. Their salons, translations, journals and transatlantic networks of connections provide a prime example of Black feminist knowledge production. Drawing on her own sculptural work on the theme of reparations, her French translation of the writings of Beatriz Nascimento, and recent works engaging with Awa Thiam and Fatou Sow, Niang explores possible interpretations of the Nardals in the 21st century and the creation of a ‘féminothèque’ for a multitude of futures based on their legacy.

In this context, the concept of translation refers not only to the act of conveying meaning between different languages, but also denotes the transition from historical fragments to future institutions, as well as the movement between Africa and its diasporas. When one reads the Nardals through the work of these other Black thinkers, archives no longer appear as immutable repositories, but can be understood as living spaces of renewal.

The work of the Nardal sisters extends an invitation to move beyond the familiar cycles of forgetting and rediscovery and to strive instead for more active forms of remembrance. This includes the Féminothèque. This is not simply a library dedicated to women. Rather, the term denotes a vibrant, multilingual and cross-generational space in which the thought of Black women can be preserved and passed on across time and geography.

Following this, Sharpley-Whiting and Niang will engage in a conversation with the writer and theorist Hemley Boum. She actively challenges the notion that the Nardal sisters have disappeared and instead identifies various failed attempts to render them invisible. This conversation will be moderated by Edwige Dro.

The writer and journalist is the founder of 1949, a library dedicated to literature by women from Africa and the Black world.

• In French and English with simultaneous interpretation into English, French and German, as well as live surtitles in English