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 4
... racism — at least that is what Richard Wright thought when , after liberation , Franco - American contacts started up with re- newed vigor during what Claude - Edmonde Magny has called “ the age of the American novel . ” Richard Wright ...
... racism — at least that is what Richard Wright thought when , after liberation , Franco - American contacts started up with re- newed vigor during what Claude - Edmonde Magny has called “ the age of the American novel . ” Richard Wright ...
Page 5
... racism in the American forces occupying Germany . He quickly became a part of French society , worked as an editor at Agence France Presse , and married a Frenchwoman . His novel The Stone Face takes up the cause of Algerian liberation ...
... racism in the American forces occupying Germany . He quickly became a part of French society , worked as an editor at Agence France Presse , and married a Frenchwoman . His novel The Stone Face takes up the cause of Algerian liberation ...
Page 6
... racism directly because the prestige of being American , and writers , spared them that . But the Arabs and increasingly numerous Africans were the objects of racial hatred . For a long time the image of libertarian France had hidden ...
... racism directly because the prestige of being American , and writers , spared them that . But the Arabs and increasingly numerous Africans were the objects of racial hatred . For a long time the image of libertarian France had hidden ...
Page 7
... racism was on the upswing in France . On the other hand , the ease and rapidity of travel in general tended to make places interchangeable . France continued to attract black writers , but in the same way she attracted their white ...
... racism was on the upswing in France . On the other hand , the ease and rapidity of travel in general tended to make places interchangeable . France continued to attract black writers , but in the same way she attracted their white ...
Page 12
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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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