Vann, California State University, Sacramentoįrom the Presidential Address booklet, 2018 AHA Annual Meeting His engrossing survey makes a compelling case that these expatriates pioneered a new type of cosmopolitan black community, one that celebrated black identity and helped them achieve a level of success denied to them back home, while they explored different modes of African-based culture from around the world.
Stovall, a history professor at UC Santa Cruz, begins with an account of his own transformative experience as an African American in Paris in the early 1980s. The 1960s and '70s saw an influx of African American emigre scientists, photographers, restaurant owners, taxi drivers, diversifying the community that today faces the rise of overt French racism. They fit into a vibrant Left Bank community that maintained close ties with Camus, Cocteau, Sartre, de Beauvoir. Postwar Paris became a magnet to writers like Richard Wright, James Baldwin and detective novelist Chester Himes, who saw themselves as political exiles from a racist U.S. In the 1930s African American expatriate writers and artists in Paris helped launch the Negritude movement.
Attracted by the myth of a color-blind France, Harlem Renaissance writers Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Countee Cullen flocked to Paris Josephine Baker conquered the stage with her sensational performances jazz musicians Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Bill Coleman lived in and drew inspiration from the City of Light.
During WWI African American soldiers, targets of discrimination on the front and back home, were welcomed cordially by ordinary French citizens. Stovall's revelatory chronicle reclaims an important yet neglected chapter of cultural history, delineating a cohesive community of black American expatriate writers, artists, musicians and intellectuals in Paris from 1914 to the present.
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