From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980

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University of Illinois Press, 1991 - 358 pages
This academic study uses accounts from more than 60 African American writers--Countee Cullen, James Baldwin, Chester Himes et al.--to explain why they were more readily accepted socially in Paris than in America. Fabre (The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright) shows that French/black American affinity started in pre-Civil War New Orleans (and not, as the title suggests, in Harlem), when illegitimate mulattos with inheritances from French slave-owners sent their children to Paris to be educated. The book concludes that acceptance and appreciation of black Americans were based largely of French distaste both for white Americans, whom the French found egotistical, and for black Africans, with whom the French had a bitter "mutual colonial history."

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Contents

The New Orleans Connection
9
Early Visitors Preachers and Abolitionists
22
After Emancipation The Talented Tenth in Paris
31
W E B Du Bois and World War I
46
Langston Hughes and Alain Locke Jazz in Montmartre and African Art
63
Countee Cullen The Greatest Francophile
76
Claude McKay and the Two Faces of France
92
Jessie Fauset and Gwendolyn Bennett
114
Chester Himess Ambivalent Triumph
215
William Gardner Smith An Eternal Foreigner
238
Literary Coming of Age in Paris
257
A New Mood Black Power in Paris
269
Visitors All or Nearly
285
William Melvin Kelley and Melvin Dixon Change of Territory
298
Ted Joans The Surrealist Griot
308
James Emanuel A Poet in Exile
324

And Others Too
129
From the New Negro to Negritude Encounters in the Latin Quarter
146
Making It in Postwar France
160
Richard Wright An Intellectual in Exile
175
James Baldwin in Paris Love and SelfDiscovery
195
Conclusion
337
Bibliography
345
Index
349
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