France Culture marks 70 years since the Sorbonne's Congress of Black Writers and Artists
A nine-part radio series revisits the 1956 gathering that brought Césaire, Senghor, Fanon and Richard Wright together in Paris, alongside two portraits of its organiser, Alioune Diop, founder of the review Présence africaine.
France Culture is running a multi-part series this week on its Nuits de France Culture strand marking the seventieth anniversary of the first Congrès des écrivains et artistes noirs, held at the Sorbonne in 1956. According to the broadcaster, the congress made culture a site of anticolonial contestation, gathering Alioune Diop, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor among other major voices of the emancipation movement.
Two episodes are devoted to Diop himself, the Senegalese intellectual who founded the review Présence africaine in Paris in 1947. France Culture describes him as a major thinker of the cause noire and of négritude, shaped by African, Arab and French influences, and one portrait dwells specifically on his Catholic faith. A separate episode, featuring the writer Michel Le Bris, traces the history of Présence africaine as a central hub of postwar Black literary thought and situates the 1956 congress within that story.
The series also revisits individual contributions to the 1956 gathering. One episode centers on Frantz Fanon's address "Racisme et culture," in which the psychiatrist and thinker linked racism, culture and the colonial system, going on to defend Algerian independence openly. Another looks at how the congress intersected with the American civil rights movement, noting that Richard Wright was among the participants and that James Baldwin covered the event as a journalist. A further episode, drawing on INA archives, revisits the congress thirty years on through the recollections of participants and witnesses, with excerpts of original speeches. The Haitian writer Jacques Stephen Alexis, a doctor and revolutionary militant known for his "réalisme merveilleux" and who died at 39 in circumstances that remain unclear, is also given a dedicated portrait within the series.
The programs are being broadcast through the week of September 19 to 20, 2026, and are available as podcasts on the France Culture site.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
