The presence of blacks in the country

Even more(prenominal) fundamental than the project of, say, developing a catalogue of famous call of melanize heritage to cover the period is the project of exploring reasons that the phenomenon of fully grown black people is to be noticed. Accordingly, a useful context of use for examining the presence of black people in France in the redbrick period is to look at high culture. For it is in the field of view of the fine arts that the presence of black people, divideicularly black the Statesns, in France has been most beardown(prenominal)ly documented.

The reasons for black Americans' presence in France from the nineteenth century onward may readily be inferred from the legacy of slavery in the United States. As the ripe nineteenth century moved into the twentieth, discrimination against blacks in America increased, notably by means of the Supreme Court finality in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1883 articulating racial segregation as the honor of the land, a black presence in France increased. Unable to immerse into the social mainstream even after Emancipation, blacks, and particularly black artists, who craved to participate in a mainstream culture appear to redeem found a haven in France. In this connection, furrow and Baker note France's historic fascination with what was perceived as the exoticism of black people, citing Robespierre's black coachman, who comported himself in African tribal dress (Chase & Baker, 1993, p. 106). There seems to have been something of an exoticism associated with b

Undoubtedly Du Bois was aware of the encounter with social soaking up that American blacks had had in France during the War. In 1919, while he was mollify editorial director of the NAACP's publication Crisis, Du Bois, who considered Africa, not America, to be his "homeland," conceived the idea of a Pan-African Congress, which was to be held in genus Paris. According to Contee (1972), Du Bois meant in part to use the Congress to position himself as a humanness leader in the humanitarian cause of African blacks and recruit his precondition among American black leadership.

A lack of strong logistical planning for the conference appears to have limited its hurtle of influence. However, Du Bois ended the conference at the peak of his personal status in the culture of both France and America.

Mudimbe-Boyi, M., and Davis, A. F. (1981). African and black American belles-lettres: the "Negro Renaissance" and the genesis of African literature in French. For Better or Worse: The American act upon in the World. A.F. Davis (Ed.). Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. 157-69.

It is a profound irony that the arc of Wright's passage moved downward after Native Son because of his refusal to be imprisoned by the thematics of race. His move to France, where he partook of the prestige affiliated to the man of color in exile from crass America, did not enlarge him as a writer. He became, perhaps, a more cosmopolitan artist. Still, as Baldwin said, speaking from within the same paradox, Paris "would not have been a city of refuge for us if we had not been armed with American passports," and "it did not seem worthy to me to have fled the native fantasy only to embrace a foreign one" (Delbanco, 1992, p. 30).

Baker, J., and Chase, C. (1993). Josephine: The hungry heart. New York: Random House, 1993.

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