Postwar Imaginings: Négritude Legacies and Thwarted Universalisms in Dakar and Paris

This chapter recalls the numerous efforts by Black intellectuals in France and its colonies to invest in cultural expressions (literary, visual, theatrical, exhibitionary) as essential tools to imagine liberated futures and new forms of postwar humanism. In examining the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists (1956, Paris) and the First World Festival of Negro Arts, 1966, Dakar), it asks how art historians might productively revisit the rise of postcolonial nation-states in Africa to better shape understandings of the fluidity and rapidity with which ideas of cultural particularism and universalism reshaped the narratives of modernism.