In France, the word noir can feel like a provocation. Meant to describe Blackness in polite terms, it is more typically whispered in hushed tones with blushing cheeks—or altogether replaced with the English term black delivered in a heavy French accent, as if the foreign word might soften its political charge. Race is something to be hinted at, not spoken out loud. And yet, when it was announced in 2020 that Agatha Christie’s classic mystery Les Dix Petits Nègres would finally be retitled Ils étaient dix (“They were ten”), the backlash was swift and loud. Suddenly, nègre—France’s equivalent to the n-word—became a hill to die on. Newspapers decried censorship, commentators bemoaned the loss of literary tradition, readers raged against the virus of political correctness. France, where race is supposedly invisible, had no problem defending a racial slur in the name of art. The event revealed a telling contradiction: Noir is too political to say, but nègre is too cultural to erase. In a country that prides itself on being colorblind, Blackness is somehow both hyper-visible and illegible.
Noir has long been treated with heavy discomfort in France, seen as a word with racist connotations by white French individuals, imbued with relics of a colonial past that France would prefer to forget. France has therefore kept its Black history under wraps, claiming a universal history to be claimed by its Black population that sidelines racially charged events. Under the guise of unconditional belonging, France’s Black diaspora has been absorbed and invisibilized within the broader French identity. French history is Black history. And yet, for all of its inclusivity and benevolent blindness to difference, Black history has never been at the forefront of French history. Events critical to France’s African diasporic subjects such as the Haitian Revolution are relegated to the status of minor historical moments. Antillean history and figures, such as Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Nardal sisters or Frantz Fanon, remain forever overshadowed by Napoléon, Voltaire, and Victor Hugo. In Paris, Blackness is curated rather than confronted.
Recent events suggest that the tide is perhaps finally shifting, moving Blackness from a largely invisible conversation that is relegated to the margins to center stage. This spring, the Centre Pompidou debuted the first exhibition solely dedicated to Black artists in Paris—“Paris Noir: Circulations artistiques et luttes anticoloniales, 1950-2000.” And on the 100th anniversary of his birth, a biopic on the life of anticolonial scholar Frantz Fanon premiered in France, finally bringing his work to the limelight.
The opening of this collection and movie brought with it hope that France was finally ready to start seeing and speaking race—instead of being relegated to a cumbersome word to be spoken through uncomfortable giggles, Noir now features in the title of a major museum exhibition.
On an unassuming white wall, the exhibition begins with a description of the project. The dozen people swarming the wall are a hint of the bustling crowd of visitors populating the entirety of the space. Pushing my way to the front, key terms like “Black condition,” “Black consciousness,” “Négritude,” “slavery and colonization,” “Black Atlantic,” “civil rights,” “equality,” look back at me. On the opposite wall, a timeline of the Black condition in France and abroad between 1944 and 1999 written in red, green, and yellow to hammer in the exhibition’s African diasporic scope. Africa is ever-present, the colors seem to say.
Occupying nearly an entire floor, Paris Noir is overwhelming, crammed with seemingly every piece of art created by a Black person who lived in or visited Paris between 1944 and 2000 that the Pompidou’s curatorial team could find. The goal of the exhibition was to meditate on what the experience of Blackness in Paris brought to art, however, the message is muffled.The exhibition features thirteen sections with hordes of visitors strolling through them. 150 Black artists with different mediums, inspirations, and backgrounds are featured, creating a cacophony of stories that make tracking a cohesive story of race in France an impossibility in a single run through of the exhibition. Over the course of three hours, I and hundreds of others shuffle along from painting to painting; jumping from whichever painting has the least viewers to whichever sculpture has the smallest audience feels like the surest strategy to preserve sanity.The crowd is diverse: a young artsy Black couple, a typical French bourgeois family with their elderly grandmother, a guided tour full of Americans, an enthusiastic British woman exclaiming “It’s amazing” at every painting, an Antillean family searching for artists from the Caribbean to show to their children… France’s diversity, rarely obvious in cultural spaces like museums that remain heavily segregated, is for once clearly reflected. The thematics and their wealth of material, however, do not feel coherent—rather, they read as a way for the exhibition to hit all the key words it presents in its first descriptive panel. Walking through “Pan-African Paris,” “Afro-Atlantic Surrealism,” “Back to Africa,” and “A New Black Paris Map,” Blackness remains somehow illegible.
To those with a trained eye or inexhaustible patience, the story of Paris Noir does quietly emerge. The subject matters and compositions hint at the story of resistance and anti-colonialism that the exhibition’s subtitle promises. However, on the grand scale, Blackness is present but not truly meditated upon. The title’s promise of “anti-colonial resistance” is lost to the idealistic, abstract, or apolitical artistic visions of the selected 150 Black artists. The art and artists featured all feel non-threatening to the accepted French memory of race: apart from a video of an interview of Angela Davis and a mention of James Baldwin’s 1963 march for Civil Rights in Paris, the art and creators of Paris Noir are curated to confirm French benevolence and cultural superiority. One section on the “Rites and Memories of Slavery” mentions the duty of memory and the refusal to forget this somber history. Yet, in the few pieces it presents, France’s role in slavery is barely meditated upon. Colorblind France ironically positions itself as a role model of this duty of memory, but stops short of considering its role in the trade that made Black artists feel the need to reflect on the tragedy through their work.
Focusing on the migration to Paris of Black individuals places the racist impetus on the countries the artists migrated from. It leads the audience to question what made these artists feel the need to seek out Paris? What situations abroad constrained them to the extent of migrating, sometimes across the world? Prioritizing these questions makes it easy for the Centre Pompidou to avoid reflecting on France’s own biases, an agenda furthered by the selected time frame.
The American dominance that prevails throughout the galleries is perhaps the exhibition’s clearest through-line and truest reflection of racial hierarchization in France. African Americans are, and have long been, at the top of the Black ladder, as the myth of Joséphine Baker and her Pantheonization reminds us. Chatting with fellow visitors at the exit, one jokingly told me: “It felt like an exhibition about the conquest of Paris by African Americans.” The over-representation of African Americans in Paris Noir reinforces the deeply entrenched racial hierarchy that places Black Americans at the top of the pyramid in France, an acceptable Other because of their glamourous exoticism. It also, more importantly for France’s self-image, further entrenches the story of race it has long chosen to tell: Paris as a safe haven of creativity free from segregation, welcoming to all. One piece of the puzzle remains curiously absent from the contextual brief: France’s own positionality in relation to Blackness.
Ambling through the exhibition’s 400 artworks, the silence remains, creating an uncomfortable void where France’s self-reflections could, and should, have been. The exhibition considers 1950-2000 to be a key moment in artistic circulation and anti-colonial resistance, citing the likes of the Négritude movement and Aimé Césaire, but while this range may mark the beginning of more visible independence movements, it misses both their inception and the beginning of the circulation of Black art and artists in Paris. Beginning in 1950 allows the Centre Pompidou to avoid questioning France’s uncomfortable chapters in relation to Black art. Starting at an earlier period, the Pompidou would have had to consider the 1931 Colonial Exposition, which drew millions of visitors to admire staged colonized people as ethnographic spectacles. It would also have required acknowledging the pillaging expeditions through West and Central Africa in the 1930s that filled French museums with looted artefacts, many of which remain unrestituted today. And it would have meant reckoning with the Othering and exoticization of Black performers in spaces like the Revue Nègre where Joséphine Baker’s banana skirt became a symbol of France’s colonial gaze. To start before 1950 would be to admit that Black presence in French culture did not begin with resistance, but with spectacularization and that the postwar rise of Black artistry in Paris was not simply a celebration of creativity, but a reclamation of subjecthood after generations of dehumanizing display.
Négritude and the currents of thoughts that led to it existed long before 1950, just like Paris as a haven for Black cultural expression was already well established in the interwar period. Joséphine Baker rose to fame in the mid-1920s after her début in La Revue Nègre. Louis Armstrong…