Paulette Nardal

Works

• 1932The Awakening of Race Consciousness

  Essay in the last issue of La Revue du monde noir: Antillean students in Paris, like African Americans before them, pass from imitating European models to a consciousness of race and an interest in Africa; the writers of the New Negro movement showed the way.

Position

Paulette Nardal is on the map as a forerunner and co-creator of the milieu from which Négritude emerged, and as an early theorist of a Black internationalism linking the colonies of the French empire with Black America. The salon in Clamart and La Revue du monde noir, published in French and English, aimed to create intellectual and moral ties among Black people across the world, to study their history and culture, and to join the Latin culture of the Antilles with an awareness of Africa in a Black humanism. In her essay “The Awakening of Race Consciousness among Black Students” (1932) she described how Antillean students in Paris, who had long sought to assimilate to French culture, were coming to a consciousness of race; she set this in a sequence of phases – imitation, then race consciousness – that, as T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting has shown, parallels Alain Locke’s account of the New Negro, and she observed that Antillean women in Paris had felt the need for racial solidarity earlier than the men. Senghor wrote in 1960 that he and his friends had come into contact with Black American writers through her salon; Nardal herself wrote to Senghor’s biographer that the young men had taken up the ideas she and her sister had tossed out and expressed them with flair – the sisters, she said, had blazed the trail for them. For decades she appeared in histories of Négritude only in passing; Sharpley-Whiting’s Negritude Women (2002) and Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s SEP entry on Négritude have made her and Jane Nardal’s contribution visible.

Life & context

Paulette Nardal was born on 12 October 1896 in Le François in Martinique, the eldest of seven daughters of an engineer and a teacher. She trained as a teacher and in 1920 went to Paris, where she studied English at the Sorbonne – among the first Black women to do so – and wrote a thesis on Harriet Beecher Stowe. With her sisters Jane and Andrée she hosted from about 1929 a salon in their flat in Clamart, where Antillean, African and African American intellectuals met; there and through her work as a journalist she came to know writers of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1931–32, with the Haitian doctor Léo Sajous, she edited the bilingual Revue du monde noir. In 1939 she survived the torpedoing of the ship on which she was returning to Martinique, which left her with lasting injuries. Back in Martinique she founded the Rassemblement féminin (1944) to prepare women for their first vote and the journal La femme dans la cité, and directed a choir, La joie de chanter, devoted to Caribbean music. She died in Fort-de-France on 16 February 1985.

Further main works

• En exil (La Dépêche africaine, 1929)
• Guide des colonies françaises: Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyane, Saint-Pierre et Miquelon (1931)
• La Revue du monde noir (ed. with L. Sajous, 1931–32)
• L’éveil de la conscience de race chez les étudiants noirs (La Revue du monde noir 6, 1932)
• Beyond Negritude: Essays from Woman in the City (tr. T. D. Sharpley-Whiting, 2009)