Paris Noir 1950-2000, Circulations artistiques et luttes anticoloniales | Exhibition catalog

Description

Before the independence movements in Africa and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, post-war Paris became a platform for resistance and emancipation, where intellectual figures such as James Baldwin, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, and Édouard Glissant paved the way for future postcolonial and decolonial thought.

Bringing together African, African American, Latin American, and Caribbean studies, this catalog serves as a living map of ongoing research-an attempt to chart the remarkable intellectual, artistic, and literary postcolonial history of Paris. The contributors explore circulations, networks, and friendships, revealing the city as a space of both belonging and non-belonging, encounters and isolation, visibility and invisibility.

They engage with concepts such as Black humanism, Négritude, and cosmopolitan and transatlantic modernisms through the lens of postcolonial and decolonial studies, queer and feminist theories, and Afro-diasporic identity politics.

Richly illustrated with numerous previously unpublished reproductions of artworks, the catalog highlights a wide array of artists and writers across disciplines-from painting and sculpture to music, cinema, and literature-through a new transcontinental approach.