These contributions take place under an overarching title that speaks to the ‘unsinkable spirits of Négritude’ and the enduring influence of the lives and work of the Nardal sisters. In Tracey Sharpley-Whiting’s keynote, she historicizes Paulette and Jane Nardal at the intersection of the intellectual and political worlds of the Caribbean, Paris, Africa, and the US in the 1930s. It situates the Nardals within interwar, Black internationalist networks, reading them through the circuits of exchange at the time, including their encounters with Eslanda Goode Robeson, whose writings on Black Paris and on Paulette Nardal carried these conversations into an African American intellectual world. Late twentieth- and twenty-first-century engagements with the Nardal sisters highlight what these earlier encounters suggest: that Black feminist thought was produced through travel, translation, correspondence, encounter, and the circulation of ideas across the Black Atlantic world.  

In a second keynote, Mame-Fatou Niang approaches the Nardal sisters not as figures awaiting yet another rediscovery, but as the creators of an intellectual method that remains urgently contemporary. Their salons, translations, periodicals, and transatlantic relationships are a prime example of Black feminist knowledge production. Drawing on her own sculptural work on reparation, her French translation of Beatriz Nascimento’s writings, and current work engaging Awa Thiam and Fatou Sow, Niang wonders how one should read the Nardals for the twenty-first century, and how their legacy guides the creation of a féminothèque for a plurality of futures. Translation here does not refer only to movement between languages. It also names movement between historical fragments and future institutions, Africa and its diasporas. Reading the Nardals through these other Black women thinkers allows for a consideration of archives not as fixed repositories, but as living sites of regeneration. Their work invites all to move beyond repeated cycles of disappearance and rediscovery and toward forms of preservation that remain active. It proposes the feminothèque as one such form: not simply a library devoted to women, but a living, multilingual, and intergenerational space where Black women’s thought can be preserved and transmitted across time and geographies.

Sharpley-Whiting and Niang are joined in a conversation with writer and thinker Hemley Boum who actively challenges the idea of the disappearance of the Nardal sisters, instead affirming the existence of various failed attempts to render them invisible. This conversation is hosted by Edwige Dro, writer, journalist, and founder of 1949—the library of women’s writings from Africa and the Black world.