The First Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris 1956 staged debates about colonial history which are still playing out in the protests of the Gilets Noirs. New Generation Thinker Alexandra Reza leafs through the pages of the journal Présence Africaine, and picks out a short story by Ousmane Sembène tracing the dreams of a young woman from Senegal. Her experiences are echoed in a new experimental patchwork of writing by Nathalie Quintane called Les enfants vont bien. And what links all of these examples is the idea of papers, cahiers and identity documents.
Producer: Emma Wallace
Alexandra Reza researches post-colonial literature at the University of Oxford. You can hear her in a Free Thinking discussion about Aimé Césaire https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000nmxf She also appears alongside Tariq Ali and Kehindre Andrews in a discussion Frantz Fanon's Writing https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000tdtn And in last week's Free Thinking episode looking at the fiction of Maryse Condé https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000v86y She is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Council to select academics to turn their research into radio.