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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 Pr\xe9sence Africaine, and picks out a short story by Ousmane Semb\xe8ne 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 Aim\xe9 C\xe9saire https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000nmxf\nShe also appears alongside Tariq Ali and Kehindre Andrews in a discussion Frantz Fanon's Writing https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000tdtn \nAnd in last week's Free Thinking episode looking at the fiction of Maryse Cond\xe9 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000v86y \nShe 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.