Her name was Jeanne Nardal.Most people came to know her as Jane.She was born in Martinique on August 1, 1902, one of seven daughters in the re
Her name was Jeanne Nardal.
Most people came to know her as Jane.
She was born in Martinique on August 1, 1902, one of seven daughters in the remarkable Nardal family.
And in 1928, while still in her twenties, this Black Caribbean woman living in France published an essay with a title that sounds startlingly contemporary:
“Internationalisme noir.”
Black Internationalism.
Not 1968.
Not 1988.
1928.
Jane Nardal was looking beyond Martinique, beyond France and beyond any single Black population and thinking about what connected Black people across nations.
That alone should have made her difficult to forget.
Somehow, we managed.
A Daughter of Martinique Goes to Paris
Jane grew up in the same intellectually rich Martinican household as her older sister Paulette.
Their father, Paul Nardal, was an engineer. Their mother, Louise, was an accomplished musician and teacher. Education was not treated as an ornament for the Nardal daughters. Their parents prepared girls to develop their minds.
Jane followed Paulette to Paris and studied literature at the Sorbonne.
But studying in Paris meant more than receiving a French education.
Paris itself was changing.
After World War I, Black people from different parts of the world were increasingly encountering one another there.
Africans.
Caribbean people.
Black Americans.
Students.
Writers.
Musicians.
Political thinkers.
Travelers.
People who could all be called Black while possessing very different histories.
That difference fascinated Jane.
What Happens When Black People Meet Across Borders?
In February 1928, the Paris newspaper La Dépêche africaine began publication.
Jane Nardal was there at the beginning.
In its first issue, she published “L’Internationalisme noir.”
The essay considered something enormous that she believed was developing around her: Black people from different nations were becoming increasingly conscious of belonging to a larger Black world.
This did not require pretending they were identical.
That is one of the most interesting things about her thinking.
Black people could have different languages, religions, nationalities and customs while recognizing something shared.
Jane was trying to describe a diaspora becoming conscious of itself.
And she understood that movement across borders was helping make it possible.
Travel mattered.
War had moved people.
Migration mattered.
Newspapers mattered.
Literature mattered.
Music mattered.
Cities like Paris mattered.
Black people were increasingly able to encounter one another’s ideas rather than knowing one another primarily through white interpretation.
That changes people.
Then America Walked Into the Conversation
Jane and Paulette were paying close attention to Black America.
This was the age of the Harlem Renaissance.
African American writers, musicians and artists were producing extraordinary work. Black American intellectual traditions were circulating internationally. W.E.B. Du Bois’s thinking about Black identity and double consciousness had already crossed the Atlantic.
Jane engaged those ideas.
But she did not simply copy them.
She asked what they meant for someone like herself: Black, Martinican, French-speaking, Caribbean, descended from enslaved Africans and culturally shaped by more than one world.
She used the idea of the Afro-Latin to describe people whose identities could contain both African and Latin cultural inheritances.
That is an important distinction.
Black internationalism did not have to erase difference.
Unity did not require sameness.
Nearly a century later, Black communities are still wrestling with that question.
Jane was wrestling with it in Paris in 1928.
She Also Saw the Trap
Paris could celebrate Black culture and still turn Black people into spectacle.
Jane noticed that too.
Later in 1928 she published another striking essay, “Pantins exotiques,” or “Exotic Puppets.”
The title tells us where she was going.
Europe’s fascination with Blackness was not necessarily the same thing as respect for Black people.
Black music could be adored.
Black bodies could be fashionable.
Black performers could fill clubs.
African art could influence European artists.
And Black people could still be exoticized.
That contradiction deserves attention because it complicates the romantic story of Black Americans finding freedom in Paris.
There was real freedom there for some.
There was also fascination.
Projection.
Colonialism.
Stereotype.
And Black women could experience that fascination in particularly sexualized ways.
Jane was observing the difference between being seen and being made into somebody else’s idea of you.
That is an old problem with a surprisingly modern face.
Meanwhile, There Was a House in Clamart
Jane and her sisters helped create something extraordinary outside central Paris.
Their home in Clamart became an informal salon where Black people from different parts of the world gathered.
Imagine that room.
Someone has recently arrived from America.
Someone else was born in Senegal.
Another came from Martinique.
Another from French Guiana.
Someone has read Du Bois.
Someone has heard the newest American jazz.
Someone has questions about colonialism.
Someone has brought a newspaper.
Someone disagrees.
Someone translates.
Someone knows somebody whom somebody else absolutely must meet.
The conversation keeps going.
Future giants of Black intellectual history passed through this world, including figures associated with what would become Négritude.
But Jane and Paulette were not merely providing chairs for important men.
They were thinkers in the room.
Jane had already published “Black Internationalism.”
She had already been developing language for an emerging diasporic consciousness.
She was not standing beside Black intellectual history.
She was participating in its creation.
And Here Is Where Women’s History Plays Tricks
Later generations became much more familiar with the men associated with Négritude.
Aimé Césaire.
Léopold Sédar Senghor.
Léon-Gontran Damas.
Their work deserves serious study.
But recovering Jane Nardal does not diminish them.
It corrects the picture around them.
Movements rarely spring fully formed from one person’s head.
There are conversations before the manifesto.
Newspapers before the famous book.
Living rooms before the conference.
Women introducing people.
Women translating.
Women writing essays.
Women noticing patterns.
Women asking questions that someone else will later become famous for answering.
Sometimes history remembers the finished building and forgets who was carrying bricks.
Jane Nardal was carrying ideas.
She Wasn’t Waiting for Feminism to Find Her
Jane’s life also asks us to rethink the way Black women’s political history is sometimes told.
There is a popular tendency to imagine feminism developing somewhere else and eventually expanding enough to include Black women.
History is far messier than that.
Black women were developing political ideas from their own lives long before later institutions found terminology for everything they were doing.
Jane did not need somebody to hand her a modern theory of intersectionality before she could recognize that Black women experienced race and sex simultaneously.
She could look around.
She could read.
She could listen.
She could compare.
She could write.
This is one reason we should be careful about forcing historical women into modern labels. Jane deserves something better than being retroactively recruited into somebody else’s movement.
Let her be Jane Nardal.
A Black Martinican woman.
A writer.
An intellectual.
A student of literature.
A participant in Black Paris.
A thinker about diaspora.
A woman contemplating race, culture and belonging before some of the movements we now associate with those ideas had names.
Her intelligence belongs to her.
Perhaps We Should Change the Question
Instead of asking:
“When did feminism begin including Black women?”
perhaps history sometimes requires us to ask:
“What were Black women already thinking, writing and building before anyone came looking for them?”
Jane Nardal gives us one answer.
Paris.
A young Black woman from Martinique sits down to write about an international Black consciousness stretching across oceans.
Nearly one hundred years later, we’re still trying to understand the world she could already see forming.
Sources for further reading
The Bibliothèque nationale de France dates La Dépêche africaine to its beginnings in Paris in 1928. Modern scholarship confirms that Jane’s “Internationalisme noir” appeared in the publication in February 1928 and identifies her as an important contributor to the development of Black internationalist thought.
French archival research also identifies Jane Nardal as a member of the editorial committee of La Dépêche africaine and credits the Nardal sisters’ writing with helping establish intellectual foundations later associated with Négritude.