Harlem, Marseilles, Martinique
Why were African Americans drawn to France in the years following World War I? What social and professional opportunities were available to them there, compared to the United States? How did the French perceive and receive them?
How do African Americans living in France, like Hughes and McKay, write about race? How do they oppose attitudes about racial difference in France to those found in the United States? To what extent did African Americans identify with other minority groups in France?
How does the presence in Paris of African American writers and their writings, including Locke’s New Negro collection, influence the emergence of the Négritude movement? What aspects of colonial experience do Négritude writers foreground in their writing? How does the comparison to the United States allow Négritude writers like Césaire to articulate the stakes of race in the French colonies? To what extent do these movements echo each other, or not, in their conceptions of “blackness”?
What forms do writers adopt to write about race in this context? To what extent are they influenced by traditional and avant-garde French forms like Cullen and Césaire, and to what extent do they, like Hughes, experiment with new forms? How does McKay’s novel use the figure of the port city to transcend divisions between French and American minorities?
James Reese Europe's band playing for hospital patients (1918). Courtesy of the National Archives.
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