AMST 336 - Blacks in Paris/Noires á Paris

Cross-Listed as FREN 336

In his unpublished essay, “I choose exile,” Richard Wright declared, “To live in Paris is to allow one’s sensibilities to be moved by physical beauty. I love my adopted city. Its sunsets, its teeming boulevards, its slow and humane tempo of life have entered deeply into my heart.” Paulette Nardal wrote in her essay “Awakening of Racial Consciousness” that living in Paris in the 1920s had created for Black women the “need of racial solidarity that would not be merely material” and an “awakening to race consciousness” that they had not experienced or understood fully before leaving home and meeting Blacks from other countries in Paris.  This course will look at the relationship that Blacks have had to France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will explore the art, literature, music and political protest that were generated in the “City of Lights.” The presence of African Americans has usually been seen, by both themselves and others, as a commentary on race. We will examine the lives of Blacks who left the United States expressly to escape the burdens of discrimination and came to Paris as self-conscious refugees from racism. We will also examine the lives of Blacks who left the French colonies to pursue a western education in France, but who developed broader philosophical ideologies, including the cultural, artistic and literary movements of la Négritude. We will examine their experiences and critique the myth of a color-blind France. Prerequisite(s): FREN 204 or higher Offered occasionally. (4 Credits)