La Marianne Noire: How gender and race in the twentieth century Atlantic world reshaped the debate about human rights

The story begins at the close of WWI when world leaders met at the Paris Peace Conference to reconfigure how nations interacted. The rhetoric produced during this period of self-determination encouraged groups around the globe to seize this unique moment in history and organize for a more just and humane world. However, the ideal of universal rights proved difficult to legislate as nations categorized racial and gendered inequality as matters to be dealt with locally rather than in the global arena. Repeatedly, groups that sought international solutions to ameliorate the condition of oppressed people were turned away.;The Nardal sisters of Martinique were among the first black women to be educated in the French colonial system. Arriving in the metropole of Paris just after the Paris Peace Conference, these sisters were central in shaping a new international black consciousness through their literary salons, publications, and social networks. Moreover, they helped to usher in a new phase of French intellectualism that was inclusive, forging networks among women and men, Africans and Americans, Jews and Catholics. Strong Catholics and French assimilationists themselves, the Nardal sisters illustrate the tensions that arose when ideological factors such as the growth of the Communist Party, the rise of fascism, and movements for decolonization threatened to destabilize the transnational common ground forged in the 1920s.;The trauma of World War II, German occupation of France, and the resulting scattering of the Park-based intelligentsia replanted the cosmopolitan consciousness developed in interwar Paris into the local communities of these colonial elites. In particular, the struggles for racial meeting and networking with each other---an experience that shifted how they viewed and related to the world around them. Ultimately, I argue that the intellectual processes that shaped a generation of transnational intellectuals between the two world wars created new social and political movements that served as countercurrents to the dominant powers of the twentieth century.