A Map to Black Paris

Doyle D. Calhoun visits “Black Paris: Artistic Circulations and Anti-Colonial Struggles, 1950–2000” at the Centre Pompidou.

By Doyle D. CalhounJune 8, 2025

• Art & Architecture

• History

IN THE LAST WEEKS of September 1956—against the backdrop of the Cold War, escalating violence in French-colonized Algeria, and Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States—some 100 artists, writers, academics, and students from Africa, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, France, and the Americas gathered in Paris, in the heart of the Latin Quarter. The occasion? An unprecedented meeting of Black writers and artists organized by Alioune Diop, the Senegalese editor who had founded the pathbreaking Pan-African journal Présence Africaine in 1947 and, in 1949, a publishing house by the same name. Over the course of four days, from September 19 to 22, the 1er Congrès international des écrivains et artistes noirs (First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists) unfolded in the Descartes Amphitheater of the Sorbonne. Lectures dealt with topics such as “racism and culture” (Frantz Fanon), “culture and colonization” (Aimé Césaire), “segregation and desegregation in the United States” (William Fontaine), and “the problems of the African artist today” (Ben Enwonwu). This gathering of African and Afro-descendent artists and intellectuals at the center of the colonial metropole occurred during a moment of reckoning for the French empire, and for European imperialism more generally. Morocco and Tunisia had gained independence that spring, and in six months, Ghana would become the first country south of the Sahara to throw off the yoke of colonial rule. Charles de Gaulle’s constitutional referendum of May 1958 would ultimately postpone independence for most countries in Francophone Africa for another two years—and Algeria would not gain independence until 1962 (just a week after the Congress concluded, the yearlong Battle of Algiers began)—but at the Congress, as elsewhere, it was clear the tides were turning. Decolonization was no longer an “if” but finally a “how” and a “when.”

Deemed the “Bandoeng” of culture, in reference to the meeting of African and Asian states held in West Java, Indonesia, in April 1955, the Congress program reads like a Who’s Who of African and Afro-diasporic intellectual history. Among the participants were future statesmen and literary luminaries such as the poet-politicians Aimé Césaire (who would become mayor of Fort-de-France, Martinique), Léopold Sédar Senghor (the first president of Senegal), and Jacques Rabemananjara (the future vice president of Madagascar), as well as Abdoulaye Wade (then an untested—and unpublished—law student who would go on to become the third president of Senegal). In addition to Césaire, Martinique was represented by the poet Édouard Glissant as well as the anti-colonial writer and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who that same year would publicly resign from his post at the French psychiatric hospital in Blida, Algeria, and join the Algerian Front de libération nationale. Other prominent Caribbean writers and intellectuals were in attendance, including the Haitians René Depestre and Jean Price-Mars and the Barbadian writer George Lamming. An American contingent comprised William Fontaine, Mercer Cook, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright. Still other participants included the novelists Amadou Hampâté Bâ (Mali), Ousmane Diop Socé (Senegal), and Mongo Beti (Cameroon); the Malagasy poet Flavien Ranaivo; the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop; and the South African artist Gerard Sekoto. There were also conspicuous absences: principally, those of women. Though key figures in the history of Black internationalism such as Josephine Baker, Jenny Alpha, Annette Mbaye d’Erneville, Suzanne Césaire, and the Nardal sisters were present, none of them were invited to contribute lectures to the program. In fact, in the group photo of the Congress, only one woman is pictured: Marie-Rose Clara Perez, seated next to her husband, Jean Price-Mars, who served as the Congress chair.

Just shy of 70 years later, that photo is given pride of place in the first gallery of a new exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris noir: Circulations artistiques et luttes anticoloniales, 1950–2000 (“Black Paris: Artistic Circulations and Anti-colonial Struggles, 1950–2000”), which pays homage to the spirit of the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists by revisiting Paris’s key role as a cultural crossroads and vibrant site of Black culture, Pan-African and diasporic thought, and anti-colonial solidarity during the second half of the 20th century. The exhibit is one of the Pompidou’s last before it closes for five years in September to undergo extensive renovations. Featuring the work of over 150 artists and spanning 50 years, Paris noir represents a long-overdue acknowledgment of the ways in which artists and writers from Africa, the Caribbean, their diasporas, and the so-called Global South more generally have shaped and reshaped cultural production for decades in France and the wider French-speaking world. It aims to map “Black Paris” in time and space by highlighting the varied but intersecting trajectories of the many African and Afro-diasporic artists, writers, and activists who studied, worked, and lived there, or simply passed through. In its focus on “artistic circulations” and “anti-colonial struggles” from the Jazz Age to the advent of hip-hop, the exhibition makes visible the transnational networks that made Paris a privileged site for the expression of African, Caribbean, and Afro-diasporic cultures in the wake of the Second World War. Alicia Knock, the lead curator of Paris noir, suggests that the “City of Lights” was more than simply a cultural hub; it was transformed by those networks and constituencies into a multicultural “salon” and “Pan-African laboratory.”

Paris noir tells the story of that transformation with some 300 artworks across a staggering range of material and media, with work from visual artists, filmmakers, dancers, and musicians. For Knock, such a variety of media was necessary given what she characterizes as the artists’ “relational, hybrid aesthetics” and the fact that music served many as a “tool of research and experimentation.” One finds books, journals, pamphlets, photographs, archival documents, and audiovisual footage on screens both large and small, as strains of music and voices from the past filter throughout the exhibition.

Unfurling across a labyrinthine space on the sixth floor of the Pompidou, the exhibition follows a rough chronology from the 1940s to 2000, further organized into thematic groupings, such as “Paris as a School,” “Afro-Atlantic Surrealisms,” and “Rites and Memories of Slavery.” This itinerary is punctuated by several large-scale multimedia installations commissioned from contemporary artists for the exhibition.

Among these, Martinican artist Valérie John’s Secret(s) … Rêves de pays … Fabrique à mémoire(s) … Palimpseste (1998–2025) stands out, occupying the center of Paris noir. An immersive installation that can be glimpsed from the adjoining rooms, it transforms the central matrix of the exhibition into a kind of indigo grotto paying homage to the Atlantic Ocean and the thought of Glissant, whose notions of creolization, “relation,” and “Le Tout-Monde” (“The Whole-World”) form leitmotifs, if not organizing tropes, for Paris noir. Shuck One’s Re-generation (2025), meanwhile, literalizes the exhibition’s ambitious claim to map Black Paris, taking the form of a four-by-10-meter collaged and graffitied map of Black history, featuring black-and-white portraits of pioneering figures, many of them women, including Angela Davis, Paulette Nardal, and Eugénie Éboué-Tell.

In contrast to the sidelining of women at the 1956 Congress, Paris noir showcases the work of pioneering women artists, such as the painters Luce Turnier (Haiti) and Younousse Sèye (Senegal), who also starred in Ousmane Sembène’s films Mandabi (1968), Xala (1975), and Faat Kiné (2000). In Self Portrait as Josephine (1986), American photographer Ming Smith portrays the iconic American-born French dancer, singer, actress, resistance agent, and civil rights activist Josephine Baker. However, one notes a real effort to rehabilitate and reimagine the lives of women who were central to early articulations of Blackness and belonging in the Francosphere but whose contributions have been overlooked. John’s Secret(s) … Rêves de pays … Fabrique à mémoire(s) … Palimpseste pays homage not only to Glissant but also to the work of Martinican writer and anticolonial activist Suzanne Césaire in the form of an assemblage featuring a slim volume of her writings, Le grand camouflage: Écrits de dissidence (1941–1945). And in a glass display case, one finds an issue of the dissident Caribbean journal Tropiques—which Césaire edited and founded with her husband, Aimé—opened to her 1945 essay “Le grand camouflage” (“The Great Camouflage”). The work of the pioneering Guadeloupean filmmaker Sarah Maldoror is also highlighted. Her films profiled key figures in Black Francophone thought and culture, including Toto Bissainthe (with whom she founded the theater company Les Griots), Léon-Gontran Damas, and especially Aimé Césaire.

The Maldoror tribute is part of the exhibition’s broader attention to early African and Caribbean cinema. As one wanders through Paris noir, one comes across projected clips from Sembène’s 1966 film La Noire de … (Black Girl), the first feature-length film by a Black African director, as well as Martinican filmmaker Euzhan Palcy’s La Rue Cases-Nègres (Sugar Cane Alley, 1983), an adaptation of Joseph Zobel’s 1950 novel. The scenes from Sembène’s black-and-white film are arresting—featuring the 17-year-old ingenue Mbissine Thérèse Diop in the role of Diouana—but they are an odd choice for an exhibition focused on “Black Paris”: La Noire de … takes place in Antibes, France, and Dakar, Senegal, and Sembène, a militant Pan-African Marxist, famously had little interest in Paris (the time he did spend in France was as a docker in Marseille), declaring Europe to be a mere “periphery” of Africa.

Although Paris’s indebtedness to Black culture has rarely been showcased in France’s art museums, and never to the ambitious scale of Paris noir, “Black Paris” is far from a novel concept. It is a story that has been told across a range of discourses for decades—everywhere, it seems, but in French art museums. That story reflects both a historical reality and a concerted effort on the part of activists, artists, authors, archivists, and academics to make visible the long-standing but long-overlooked presence of African and African-descended peoples in the capital. Indeed, “Black Paris,” “Black France,” “Black French studies,” and “global Black French studies” name vibrant, active fields of research that have given rise to a now robust body of scholarship exploring the history and politics of Blackness in France and the Francosphere, the meanings and limits of the notion of “Black Paris,” and, in particular, how the vibrancy of Black diasporic culture in France emerged out of the contexts of colonialism, racial segregation, immigration (including BUMIDOM and France’s policy of “regroupement familial”), political exile, and, more recently, transnational migration and globalization.

Early articulations of Black French studies include important works such as Tyler Stovall’s Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (1996), a study of Black Americans in Paris from the arrival of the Black GIs in the First World War to the 1990s, as well as Bennetta Jules-Rosette’s Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape (1998), which surveys three generations of African writers in France, from the founding of Présence Africaine to the turn of the millennium. The phrase “Black France” graces the cover of Dominic Thomas’s important monograph on Black expressive culture in France, published in French as Noirs d’encre (2013), as well as several edited volumes: La France noire (2011), Black France/France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness (2012), and Notre France noire: De A à Z (2023). More recently, Le Paris Noir is the name of Kévi Donat’s successful podcast, walking tour series, and book, which explore the city’s hidden Black history. Such work points to how Black Paris exists alongside and in spite of historical erasure and the enduring legacies of slavery, colonization, anti-Black racism, and police violence.

The growing field of global Black French studies also grapples directly with the fact that the phrases “Black France” or “Black Paris” reveal a paradox central to Black experience in France: in a country whose constitution refuses to recognize race as a legal category, Blackness remains an active site of political contestation. Moreover, as Cameroonian novelist Léonora Miano writes in Afropea: Utopie post-occidentale et post-raciste (2020), “Blackness” is a category that ultimately remains “unthought” in the French language. This was a claim Jean-Paul Sartre had made as early as 1948 in his essay “Black Orpheus,” which prefaced L. S. Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poèsie nègre et malgache de langue française (“Anthology of New Negro and Malagasy Poetry in French,” 1948) and would later inspire the title of a Nigerian arts and culture magazine, early issues of which figure in a vitrine in the Paris noir exhibition. In that essay, Sartre writes that the French language—comprised of a syntax and vocabulary “forged in another time, thousands of leagues away”—is “unfit for furnishing [the Black writer] with the means of speaking about himself, his problems, his hopes.”

Given the vibrancy of research on Black Paris—and the fact that many of the key studies in the field could easily have lent the exhibition its title—it is surprising that neither the exhibition nor the essays in the catalog (which includes 25 essays, though none by scholars based in African museums or institutions) acknowledge its indebtedness to or awareness of this existing scholarship, with the exception of a couple fleeting bibliographic references. Greater engagement with Black French studies as a discipline would have enriched the exhibition and likely helped address some of its weak spots. Pascal Blanchard and Dominic Thomas, who have worked for the past 25 years on Black presence in France, shared with me that, in their view, the exhibition fails “to adequately connect the narrative pertaining to the presence and perception of Black diasporas in France with the actual countries of origin of the artists that are in many instances outside the space of Black Paris.” Blanchard and Thomas point to the fact that many of the selected works “speak neither of immigration, nor of colonization, nor of the legacy of Empire, nor of France, nor of Paris.”

Other specialists share related concerns. Paul-Aimé William, a Guyanese art historian who consulted on the exhibition, spoke to me about what a French institution’s possibly uncritical appropriation of the term “noir” might mean today: does it simply reinscribe the coloniality of knowledge and what William calls the “imperiality of art”? “France is always one step behind,” he says, adding that the exhibition will surely “profit the Pompidou more than it benefits Black artists.” While the exhibition offers a certain visibility to something it calls “Black art,” William notes, that visibility is far from emancipatory. To break out of such structural asymmetries, namely that between “center” and “periphery,” he says, “one must change the notion of art itself.”

In a series of Instagram posts that went live shortly after the exhibition opened, Chris Cyrille—an art critic, independent curator, and doctoral student at NYU who previously worked at the Centre Pompidou in the context of the museum’s service de la création contemporaine et prospective, the department Knock now directs—writes that it is time for the art world to “acknowledge institutional asymmetries and to affirm an anti-racist cultural politics.” Cyrille points to the Finnish national museum of contemporary art, Kiasma, and La Colonie, the café-agora run by Kader Attia, which has since closed, as more inclusive models for the contemporary art museum.

On an organizational level, Paris noir somewhat struggles to contain the sheer richness and diversity of the material it displays, falling prey to the desire to say something about all of it. In her introduction to the exhibition catalog, Knock writes that the ambition of the exhibit is not to absorb Black diasporic artistic practices into a French discourse, nor to retroactively assign those practices to exclusive cultural affiliations, nor to unify disparate historical identities. And yet, in some ways, the exhibition ends up doing all of these things by filtering artists’ works through European art historical categories (surrealism, abstraction, modernism, postmodernism) and grouping artists by place of origin, all while following a fairly strict linear chronology in three tranches: the 1950s and ’60s, the 1970s, and the 1980s and ’90s.

Is the exhibition offering us a map or a timeline of Black Paris? Is its guiding framework Pan-African or transatlantic? The answer to those questions, provided in a sense by Shuck One’s “regenerative” map of Black history, is “all of the above.” As Knock writes in her introduction, the exhibition adopts both “a cartographic and historiographic form.” It is also a work of urban “archaeology,” she told me, insofar as the exhibition excavates subterranean networks and itineraries of artists and intellectuals who often worked in difficult conditions and in isolation, in small studios spread across the city, in many cases in neighborhoods (such as the Bastille of the 1980s) that no longer exist. Paris noir is also a journey through that Paris.

On a theoretical level, the exhibition draws equal inspiration from Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993), the militant Pan-Africanism of the 1950s and ’60s, and Glissant’s notions of “relation” and the Tout-Monde. As Charles Forsdick, a specialist in Caribbean postcolonial thought and editor of the Glissant Translation Project, points out, Glissant’s Tout-Monde has already had a rich life in curatorial terms. The Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, who would become a close friend and collaborator of Glissant after their first meeting in the 1990s, developed a number of exhibitions, performances, and public conversations inspired by Glissant’s Tout-Monde and “mondialité” (worldliness). Because it actively unsettles stable understandings of the nation-state, and the unity of “France” in particular, Forsdick says, Glissant’s thought is potentially in tension with any exhibition “privileging Paris, even when Paris is seen as a node or lieu or broader relational network.” Knock is certainly aware of these possible tensions, telling me that drawing on Glissant’s concepts was part of an effort also to “decentralize Paris,” or at least to mobilize Paris as “a methodological and critical space.”

The combination of spatial, temporal, political, and theoretical frameworks at work in Paris noir at times overwhelms, obscuring a single narrative through line. At the same time, the exhibition’s key concept—Blackness—and its central site—Paris—are surprisingly undertheorized. The connection of many, if not most, of the artworks to Paris is largely implicit or tangential—a question of biographic detail or context. Very few works actually depict or represent Paris itself in any straightforward way. That “noir” is hardly interrogated is a missed opportunity given not only how fraught the constellation of terms related to Blackness in French is but also how several of the writers and artists represented in the exhibition directly question the usefulness and rhetorical unity of that very term—noir/black—in their work. Indeed, throughout their careers, Senghor and Aimé Césaire preferred to use the historically pejorative “nègre”—rehabilitated as a capacious category of self-affirmation in the neologism “négritude”—instead of the word “noir.”

The various meanings of “Blackness” and the political stakes of articulating Black identity in French were certainly live topics at the First Congress in 1956, where Césaire and Senghor’s négritude brushed up against the American “New Negro” and the Pan-African “African Personality,” as well as Fanon’s Black existentialism and radical anti-colonialism. While participants of the Congress acknowledged something called “le monde noir” (the Black world), they also questioned whether “Blackness” was even a salient category through which to view or understand cultural production by artists and writers whose lived and historical experiences were incredibly diverse and not reducible to the fact of being Black. In his opening remarks at the Congress, Alioune Diop argued that “the dominant event in our history was the slave trade” and that this was “the primary link” connecting delegates, “justifying [their] gathering together here.” Meanwhile, Césaire insisted that “the common denominator” was not Blackness but “the colonial situation.”

Weaknesses notwithstanding, there is an undeniable significance and impressive aesthetic force to Paris noir. While earlier exhibitions in Parisian museums have sought to document and highlight Black life in France—often framing themselves as a corrective to the historical record—none have matched Paris noir in scope. Black Models: From Géricault to Matisse, at the Musée d’Orsay in 2019, was an important intervention, exploring representations of Blackness in the visual arts, from the first abolition of French slavery (1794) to the present. However, the “Black figures” represented in European art ultimately remained figurants. Few French art museums have focused on Black subjects as producers of art. The Pompidou, in some ways, had already led the charge in this respect, with temporary exhibits such as Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent (2005), which displayed close to 200 works by contemporary African artists, and, in 2015, the manifesto-exhibition Modernités plurielles de 1905 à 1970 (Plural Modernities from 1905 to 1970), which sought to globalize the Pompidou’s collection by incorporating African and Caribbean artistic modernisms.

Does Paris noir ultimately herald a new direction for the Pompidou and the French national art museum more generally? Knock certainly hopes so. What started as a long-term project of acquiring artworks by African and Afro-descendant artists and integrating those works into the Pompidou’s collection in the aim of “decolonizing the museum” culminates in this ambitious exhibition shortly before the museum shuts its doors for five years. Many of the works in the exhibition have been or soon will be acquired by the Pompidou. When the museum reopens in 2030, perhaps Paris noir will have helped to redefine the museum’s collections and thus also its sense of self, its publics, and its history. “Paris changes!” writes Charles Baudelaire, and “the shape of a city changes faster […] than the human heart.” But the Parisian art museum moves at a snail’s pace.

African and Afro-diasporic artists certainly do not “need” the sanctioning or affirmation of major European museums and institutions for their contributions to global art history to be recognized or valued—to be put “on the map,” so to speak. Indeed, such cultural production has typically emerged against the grain of the European art world and in direct tension with its discourses and institutions—from which, in France as elsewhere, Black artists and curators were historically excluded and in which they remain underrepresented. A single exhibit will likely do little to address the very real structural challenges African and Afro-diasporic artists and curators continue to face in France.

In a recent essay, “The People’s Paris Noir: Everyday Lives, Unarchived,” Hajar Ouahbi points to the fact that the real history of Black Paris “isn’t housed in grand institutions but in private collections, family photo albums, and underground publications,” concluding with a call to make that history “accessible to those who lived it and their descendants” by including “the voices of everyday people.” This “other” Black Paris—the Paris noir of the everyday—though less spectacular, perhaps, is worth keeping in view.

Paris noir will ultimately mean different things to different people—just as the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists did. Its value will have been less in successfully mapping Black Paris, incorporating Black artists onto an existing map, or fitting them into a grand art historical narrative than in having offered a glimpse of how those artists and their works have been proposing alternative cartographies and alternative historiographies of global art history all along.

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Featured image: Valérie John. Secret(s) … Rêves de pays … Fabrique à mémoire(s) … Palimpseste (1998–2025). Paris noir: Circulations artistiques et luttes anticoloniales, 1950–2000, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2025. Installation view photo by Doyle D. Calhoun.