Black and Beautiful: The Aesthetic Politics of the Nardal Sisters' Négritude

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 (The Woman in the City, 1945—50). The poetic gesture by author Amandine Nana 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 formulated this expression in 1945 in their poem “Ecoute...”, which was published in the first edition of La Femme dans la Cité.

Long before the slogan “Black is Beautiful” appeared in the USA at the beginning of the 1960s, Jane and Paulette had begun to decolonize and reformulate ideas of beauty and blackness in their writings. Nana's poetic gesture allows the work of the two to enter into a dialogue with historical and speculative iconographic research and opens up a black feminist reflection that deals with the aesthetic politics of the Nendal Sisters' Négritude. The project places the aesthetic and political question of black beauty and its efforts to restore the humanity and cultural identity of the Black Subject at the center of the story of Négritude.