Black women writers in early twentieth-century Paris

This chapter provides an overview of the writing of Black women intellectuals in Paris during the early decades of the twentieth century, when the city was the site of Black political and cultural liberation activities. The writers discussed in this chapter lived and theorized the intersectionality of race, class, gender, and other markers of social difference well before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term. The writers studied in this chapter include the Antilleans Paulette Nardal, Jane Nardal, and Suzanne Césaire, whose work contributed to the forces and ideas that shaped the Negritude movement. The writers Jessie Fauset and Gwendolyn Bennett represent diverse facets of debates about citizenship and gender that shaped the New Negro movement. Looked at comparatively, these women’s texts raise questions that are still relevant today: how relationships among women in the global African Diaspora are inflected by the legacies of colonialism and enslavement; the meaning of common African roots; and how to forge feminist agendas across national, class, and linguistic boundaries.