Focusing on the major intellectual debates surrounding the Black and African Renaissance, the interview with Sarah Frioux-Salgas, head of archives and collections’ resources at the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac media library, covers topics such as the role of Black writers’ and artists’ congresses and art festivals in the cultural reaffirmation of Black people during the decolonization era of the 1950s-60s, the place of literature in the shaping of Black pan-African and transcontinental solidarity, the figure of the Black intellectual, particularly that of Léopold Sédar Senghor, and the networks of ideological affinities and antagonisms formed by Black writers, artists and activists. The interview aims to highlight the complexity of the socio-political and aesthetic issues at stake, all too often summed up in simplified definitions of projects such as negritude or Pan-Africanism.

Focusing on the major intellectual debates surrounding the Black and African Renaissance, the interview with Sarah Frioux-Salgas, head of archives and collections’ resources at the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac media library, covers topics such as the role of Black writers’ and artists’ congresses and art festivals in the cultural reaffirmation of Black people during the decolonization era of the 1950s-60s, the place of literature in the shaping of Black pan-African and transcontinental solidarity, the figure of the Black intellectual, particularly that of Léopold Sédar Senghor, and the networks of ideological affinities and antagonisms formed by Black writers, artists and activists. The interview aims to highlight the complexity of the socio-political and aesthetic issues at stake, all too often summed up in simplified definitions of projects such as negritude or Pan-Africanism.