Les Sœurs Nardal: The Unsinkable Ghosts of Négritude

The contributions to this event have a common title, which addresses the “unsinkable spirits of Négritude” and the lasting influence of the life and work of the Nardal sisters. In her keynote speech, Tracey Sharpley-Whiting places Paulette and Jane Nardal in the context of the 1930s at the interface of intellectual and political worlds in the Caribbean, Paris, Africa and the USA. It places the Nardals in the black internationalist networks of the interwar period and views them against the backdrop of former associations for the purpose of mutual exchange. This includes her encounters with Eslanda Goode Robeson, whose writings about “Black Paris” and Paulette Nardal carried the content of the conversations held there to the African-American intellectual world. The repeated engagement with the Nardal sisters in the late 20th and early 21st century underlines what these earlier encounters already suggested: Black feminist thinking has developed primarily through travel, translation services, correspondence, encounters and the exchange of ideas throughout the “Black Atlantic” world.

In the second keynote speech, Mame-Fatou Niang does not regard the Nardal sisters as personalities who are waiting for a new rediscovery, but as creators of an intellectual approach that is still strikingly topical. Her salons, translations, magazines and transatlantic networks of contacts provide a prime example of black feminist knowledge production. Based on her own sculptural work on the theme of reparations, her French translation of the writings of Beatriz Nascimento, and recent works that deal with Awa Thiam and Fatou Sow, Niang asks about possible interpretations of the Nardals in the 21st century and about the creation of a féminothèque for a variety of futures based on their legacy. In this context, the term translation does not only refer to transmission services between different languages, but also describes the transition from historical fragments to future institutions and the movement between Africa and its diasporas. If you read the Nardals through the work of these other Black Thinkers, archives no longer appear as immutable repositories, but can be understood as living places of renewal.

The work of the Nardal Sisters is an invitation to go beyond the familiar cycles of forgetting and rediscovery and to strive for more active forms of remembrance instead. This also includes the Féminothèque. It is not simply a library dedicated to women. Rather, the term describes a lively, multilingual and intergenerational space in which Black women's thinking can be preserved and passed on across time and geographies.

Sharpley-Whiting and Niang then have a conversation with writer and theorist Hemley Boum. She actively questions the thesis of the Nardal Sisters' disappearance and instead identifies various failed attempts to make them invisible. This conversation will be moderated by Edwige Dro. The writer and journalist is the founder of 1949, a library for literature by women from Africa and the Black World.