From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980University 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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Page 3
... months , like Langston Hughes , his friend the novelist Jessie Fauset , and young poet Gwen- dolyn Bennett . Hughes , down to his last penny in 1924 , washed dishes in jazz cabarets but discovered the splendor of spring in Paris . As ...
... months , like Langston Hughes , his friend the novelist Jessie Fauset , and young poet Gwen- dolyn Bennett . Hughes , down to his last penny in 1924 , washed dishes in jazz cabarets but discovered the splendor of spring in Paris . As ...
Page 6
... had in the eyes of Claude McKay : a gateway to Africa , one stop on the voyage toward a new black world . The novelist William Melvin Kelley stayed in France for several months in 1968 as a sort of introduction to his 6 Introduction.
... had in the eyes of Claude McKay : a gateway to Africa , one stop on the voyage toward a new black world . The novelist William Melvin Kelley stayed in France for several months in 1968 as a sort of introduction to his 6 Introduction.
Page 7
Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980 Michel Fabre. months in 1968 as a sort of introduction to his projected discovery of Africa . During those years not all the black writers passing through shared that attitude . Melvin Van ...
Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980 Michel Fabre. months in 1968 as a sort of introduction to his projected discovery of Africa . During those years not all the black writers passing through shared that attitude . Melvin Van ...
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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 |
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