There is no social or revolutionary movement that does not develop artistic and cultural theory. Artists have played, and continue to play, an important role in social and revolutionary movements.

In Réunion, maloya, a music, performance, dance, and ritual created by the enslaved, played an important role in the anticolonial movement. Banned from public performance in the 1960-1970s because of its “blackness” and “Africanness”, it was performed publicly for the first time by Firmin Viry and his family at the Communist Party Congress of 1976. That performance became the first maloya record. Maloya was at the time performed by a family led by composer, writer, and singer Granmoun Bébé, with contributions from his band members Granmoun Baba, Lo Rwa Kaf, Firmin Viry; it has since become professionalized and sung in concert.

I also witnessed the role of cinema when the anticolonial Communist movement invited the filmmaker Yves Le Masson to document its struggle in 1962. The resulting documentary Sucre amer was forbidden by the French state for ten years and consequently seen in clandestine sessions. In Algiers, I became a daily visitor of the Cinémathèque which was a center of Third World cinema. It was in this spirit that I cofounded the “Decolonize the Arts,” association with four other women in 2015, which opened, a free university at Paris, in 2016.