Shortly before opening, Paris Noir became mired in controversy when Guadeloupean curator Chris Cyrille accused the show’s lead curator, Alicia Knock, of appropriating his curatorial concept and research. His Instagram post sparked debate over Knock’s role as a white curator of France’s largest exhibition of Black art to date, conceived as responding to shared experiences of colonisation and the Middle Passage. Other historians and curators subsequently waded in. These tensions reflect both the difficulty of staging such an exhibition in a country that treats racial identity as a deviation from the civic norm – a framing that renders projects like Paris Noir at once exceptional and suspect – and the persistent entanglement of identity politics and individualism in an otherwise noble effort to present a fuller, more accurate history of globalised art: one in which Paris represents an important hub.