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CBESA’s Director co-curated the second edition of the Diaspora Salon, hosted at Jnane with cultural entrepreneur and financier Claude Grunitzky and lawyer Meryanne Loum Martin. The Diaspora Salon is an annual gathering dedicated to breaking silos, shaping new narratives, and forging the alliances that history once sought to keep apart.

Pulitzer, Goncourt, Peabody, and Grammy laureates joined authors, actors, musicians, award-winning entrepreneurs, lawyers, physicians, academics, tech innovators, museum curators, and filmmakers in a shared space. Together, they convened with a common purpose: to connect, to collaborate, and to build across borders.

From the curators: “We are organizing the second edition of the Diaspora Salon in Marrakech because the conversations we began there felt both urgent and unfinished. At a moment when narratives are being flattened, extracted, or automated, the Diaspora Salon is a space to slow down, gather with intention, and reclaim the power of authorship—of our stories, our images, our ideas, and our futures. By bringing together leading authors, designers, filmmakers, artists, thinkers, and creatives from across the African diaspora, we are affirming Blackness as a global inheritance: plural, dynamic, and deeply rooted.

This year’s themes: "Reclaiming the Wor(l)d", "Writing Our Presence", "Futures, Technologies and Business for Generational Wealth" and "The Wealth of Our Identities" reflect a shared commitment to presence over erasure, creation over reaction, and long-term vision over short-term gain.

Jnane Tamsna in Marrakech, at the crossroads of Africa, the Arab world, and the global diaspora, offers a symbolic and practical ground for these exchanges. The Diaspora Salon is not a conference, but a living laboratory—where ideas circulate freely, solidarities are formed, and new cultural, economic, and imaginative architectures can emerge.”

— Meryanne Loum-Martin, Mame-Fatou Niang, Claude Grunitzky