The Paris Paradox

This essay maps out a six-year literary transformation of Paris noir from 1957 to 1963 that overlaps with the Algerian war for independence from France (1954–1962). In this journey that transits from Parisian utopianism to postcolonial criticism, from Richard Wright and James Baldwin's love songs to racially liberal Paris to William Gardner Smith's shrewd attack on French colonialism, the trope of interracial romance undergirds both the construction and the questioning of a colorblind Paris. I argue that as African American expatriate writers included North African characters and decolonization issues in their fiction, they struggled to reconcile the coexistence of a colorblind and a colonial Paris. The two-faced city is located in the periphery of expatriate fiction, in Wright's lesser-known novel The Long Dream (1958) and its 1959 sequel, “Island of Hallucination,” an unpublished roman à clef and his only long work of fiction set in Paris, in James Baldwin's short story “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” (1960) rather than his celebrated Paris novel, Giovanni's Room (1956), and in the understudied author William Gardner Smith's last novel The Stone Face (1963). The essay highlights telling differences in how each author grappled with French colonialism, and how they echoed and reversed each other's writings to position themselves vis-à-vis the so-called City of Light. Together, their narratives demonstrate how Algerian Paris surreptitiously came to displace France and Europe as a model of liberation for African American writers

Art · Art history · Colonialism · Criticism · Expatriate · Independence (probability theory · Literature · Narrative · Poetry · Trope (literature · Wright · African history and culture studies · History · North African History and Literature · Travel Writing and Literature

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• Embodied Fictions, Melancholy Migrations

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• The Divided Mind of James Baldwin

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• Black Fire

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• “But I Ain’t African, I’m American!”

  Ch Didier Gondola•Blackening Europe•2012

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• The Cold War and the Color Line

  Open Access•Thomas Borstelmann•Cold War and the Color Line•2009

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• Race against Empire

  Penny M Von Eschen•Race Against Empire•2014

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• Critical Essays on James Baldwin

  Open Access•Alan Nadel, Fred L Standley et al.•South Central Review•1989

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• Preface to the stone face

  Tyler Stovall•Contemporary French and…•2004

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• Non, nous ne jouons pas la trompette

  Rebecca Ruquist•Contemporary French and…•2004

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• From Harlem to Paris

  James Nagel, Michael Fabre•American Literature•1993

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• The Fire this Time

  Tyler Stovall•Yale French Studies•2000

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• Black Paris

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• The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright

  Edward Margolies, Michel Fabre•African American Review•1995

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