The Nardal Salon, Re-enactments and Re-enchantments

Press release, 19.10.2026

The Nardal Salon,

Re-enactments and Re-enchantments

Lectures, Conversations, Performative and Poetic Gestures, Film Screening, DJ Set

28 & 29 November 2026

With The Nardal Salon, Re-enactments and Re-enchantments, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) brings the Parisian salon of sisters Paulette and Jeanne Nardal back to life on 28 and 29 November 2026. Honouring the pioneers of the Négritude movement, the project asks what we can learn from their legacy a century later. A programme of literature, poetry, dance, performance and music brings historical and contemporary forms of the salon into dialogue, exploring spaces of exchange, solidarity and future-making.

What happens when we gather? During the 1920s and 30s, Paulette Nardal and her sister Jeanne created one of the most influential meeting places for Black intellectuals during the interwar period. The Nardal Salon was an incubator for ideas, debates and cultural exchange. Through gatherings with writers, pedagogues, artists, and activists such as Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Léon-Gontran Damas, Suzanne Lacascade, René Maran, Léopold Senghor and many others, the Nardal sisters contributed significantly to establishing Paris as an intellectual hub for the Black world. Yet while male figures such as Césaire and Senghor became widely recognised as founders of the Négritude, the Nardal sisters’ contribution to the movement’s emergence remained largely overlooked for decades.

The Nardal Salon, Re-enactments and Re-enchantments revives the salon as a space of presence, collective thought and political imagination. Drawing on the legacy of the Nardal sisters’ work, the project approaches the salon as a living practice. In a moment marked by growing backlash against pluralism and shrinking spaces for dissent, the salon as an infrastructure for collective thought takes on renewed urgency. Connecting with other diasporic spaces of gathering in Abidjan, Berlin, Dakar, Douala, Fort-de-France and Paris, the project asks how communal spaces of self-determination and refuge can be created and sustained over time.

With: Jumoke Adeyanju, Lisa Anderson, Archive Books, Maisha-Maureen Auma, Vincent Bababoutilabo, Hemley Boum, Miriam Siré Camara, Edwige Dro, Brent Hayes Edwards, Simone Lagrand, Léa Mormin-Chauvac, Amandine Nana, Bisrat Negassi, Mame-Fatou Niang, Pascale Obolo, Élodie Paul, Ròt-Bò-Krik, Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Eric Otieno Sumba, Sónia Vaz Borges, and others.

For interview requests and accreditations, please contact presse@hkw.de.

Press photos: hkw.de/pressphotos

More information: hkw.de/en/SalonNardal

Programme

Free entry

The Nardal Salon,

Re-enactments and Re-enchantments

Lectures, Conversations, Performative and Poetic Gestures, Film Screening, DJ Set

28 & 29 November 2026

Sat., 28.11.

12:00–00:00

Féminothèque