Paris Noir 1950-2000 : Circulations artistiques et luttes anticoloniales

Exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, 29 March - 30 June 2025

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 post- and decolonial futures.

Bringing together African, Afro-American, Latin American and Caribbean studies, this exhibition catalogue is a living cartography of ongoing research, an attempt to map the formidable postcolonial intellectual, artistic and literary history of Paris. The contributors pay close attention to circulations, networks and friendships, where the city emerges as a place of possible belonging and non-belonging, encounters and isolation, visibility and invisibility.

Richly illustrated, the book highlights numerous artists and writers in all disciplines, from painting and sculpture to music, film and literature, in a new transcontinental approach.