In the aftermath of the Second World War, Paulette and Jane Nardal—who had been at the forefront of the Négritude movement—returned to Martinique. There, they became involved in local feminist movements and founded the magazine La Femme dans la Cité (1945–50). This poetic gesture by the author Amandine Nana takes as its starting point the expression of a ‘new Eve’ who is ‘Black and beautiful’ (‘Eve nouvelle / Noire et belle’), formulated in 1945 by the two sisters in their poem ‘Ecoute...’, published in the first issue of La Femme dans la Cité. 

Long before the ‘Black is Beautiful’ slogan emerged in the early 1960s in the US, Jane and Paulette had already begun rearticulating and decolonizing notions of beauty and Blackness in their writings. Placing their work in dialogue with historical and speculative iconographic research, this poetic gesture offers a Black feminist meditation on the Nardal sisters’ aesthetic politics of Négritude. This project places the aesthetic and political question of Black beauty—in its effort to restore the humanity and cultural identity of the Black subject—at the heart of the history of Négritude.