Black Paris documents the struggles and successes of three generations of African writers as they strive to establish their artistic, literary, and cultural identities in France. Based on long-term ethnographic, archival, and historical research, the work is enriched by interviews with many writers of the new generation. Bennetta Jules-Rosette explores African writing and identity in France from the early négritude movement and the founding of the Présence Africaine publishing house in 1947 to the mid-1990s. Examining the relationship between African writing and French anthropology as well as the emergence of new styles and discourses, Jules-Rosette covers French Pan-Africanism and the revolutionary writing of the 1960s and 1970s. She also discusses the new generation of African writers who appeared in Paris during the 1980s and 1990s.
''Jules-Rosette paints an exotic, gritty tableau spanning decades and continents. Here African writers elucidate their worlds. The Parisian Negritude movement is juxtaposed against revolutionary writing, and often the reservations of African American literary giants, including James Baldwin and Richard Wright. Her study of African writers in Paris displays a confident grasp of their diverse and complex ideas, while effectively capturing sentiment, language and culture in one fell swoop... Interviews, poetry and insightful essays make Black Paris a gold mine for anyone with a thirst for black culture and an interest in African literature and Pan-Africanism.'' Idriys Emanuel Pierson, Black Issues Book Review ''Jules-Rosette's skillfully crafted and readable work outlines the development of Francophone African writing from the early negritude movement of the 1940s and the founding of the journal Presence Africaine by Alioune Diop in 1947 to the universalism of the 1990s... Excellent translations of French texts, notes, chronology, and references.'' Choice ''The definitive statement on the identities Afro-Parisian literati have created and are creating within the European modern and postmodern cultural contexts.'' Gerald M. Platt, University of Massachusetts ''A tour de force in diaspora studies, the book captures an unfolding tension, critically regarded in the text, between cultural uniqueness in a cosmopolitan setting and visions of, to use Lvi-Strauss's phrase for totemism, 'humanity without frontier.''' Richard Werbner, editor of Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power ''Black Paris is an aerial view of Francophone African writing over a seventy-year period... [Jules-Rosette] captures the details of the writers' everyday lives, which can be crucial and yet are often neglected.'' Terri Francis, Modernism ''Black Paris is highly recommended reading, especially for scholars of Francophone Studies and Pan-African Studies. It touches on a question that has yet to be fully examined: what are the literary forms assumed by Pan-Africanism in Francophone territories?'' Sylvie Kand, Modern Fiction Studies
