In the June 1940 issue of The Atlantic, the iconoclastic Black American author Richard Wright responded to a review of his recently published novel, Native Son, that had appeared in this magazine the month prior. Wright’s rebuttal, titled “I Bite the Hand That Feeds Me,” took his reviewer to task for a great many critical misreadings, most involving his characterization of the novel’s murderous protagonist, Bigger Thomas. But among the most arresting lines was an observation wholly removed from Chicago, where Native Son is set, and Mississippi, where both Wright and the critic, David L. Cohn, were born. After asserting that “the Negro problem in America is not beyond solution,” Wright dropped a parenthetical that portended a core tension in his future work: “I write from a country—Mexico—where people of all races and colors live in harmony and without racial prejudices or theories of racial superiority. Whites and Indians live and work and die here, always resisting the attempts of Anglo-Saxon tourists and industrialists to introduce racial hate and discrimination.”

Wright’s view of racism as a uniquely American inheritance would recur through much of his work—most intensely in “I Choose Exile,” an unpublished but later resurfaced 1951 essay in which Wright waxed poetic about France (“above all, a land of refuge”). Wright was by no means the first Black American creative figure to find artistic freedom and relative safety only after leaving the United States. Paris played host, and later home, to Josephine Baker and other Black American performers, as well as James Baldwin and William Gardner Smith. The city looms large in the Black intellectual history of the 20th century, and for many on this side of Y2K, the prospect of finding freedom overseas remains as alluring as ever.

Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad, a new book by the historian Tamara J. Walker, contextualizes the eternal conundrum of Wright’s work and politics by focusing on a different phase of his elective exile. Walker’s book constructs a lineage of Black Americans nurturing creative ingenuity through migration, making the case for freedom of movement as a companion to the freedom of expression. But it also elucidates the complex ways that anti-Black racism manifested both within the United States and in the countries where her subjects sought (and sometimes found) refuge. For example, Wright spent 1950 in Buenos Aires, then referred to as “the Paris of the Americas,” where the first film adaptation of Native Son was being shot. Unlike his travels in Paris or Mexico, his experience of Argentina was “one of the darkest times of his life,” Walker writes, and was rarely referenced in his own work. By situating his experience within a larger tradition of Black exodus, Walker paints a more nuanced portrait of the mordant literary figure—someone whose prescience, born partly of exile, still troubles the literary canon.

Of the loose cadre of Black expats living on either side of the Seine, Wright was certainly the most sanguine about his years in Europe. The author wrote about his time in Paris with breathless enthusiasm, maintaining until his death in 1960 that “there is more freedom in one square block of Paris than there is in the entire United States of America!” Both Baldwin and Gardner Smith, however, rejected Wright’s view of Paris as a racial utopia, even as they both found some measure of comfort and success there. Not long after Wright’s death, Baldwin published “Alas, Poor Richard,” a sorrowful account of their fractured friendship in which he criticized his erstwhile friend and mentor for idealizing a country that “would not have been a city of refuge for us if we had not been armed with American passports.”  

Walker, an associate professor of Africana studies at Barnard College of Columbia University, takes up this contradiction in her book: Each chapter of Beyond the Shores relays the story of one or two people (many of them artists of some kind—authors, singers, pianists, filmmakers) who traveled to one or two places during a specific decade. Their journeys take them to some expected vistas (Paris, London, post–World War II Germany) as well as to destinations with far less scholarship on Black American presence: Đà Nẵng, Kabondo, Kisumu, Yangiyul. In a chapter focusing on Ricki Stevenson, an American journalist turned tour guide in modern Paris, Walker underscores the enduring truth of Baldwin’s civil-rights-era critique. The multigenerational presence of Black people from African and West Indian nations once colonized by France began in the 17th century, when they were trafficked as human cargo. That many white Parisians would welcome an upwardly mobile American auteur in the early 20th century didn’t mean racial tolerance was inherently embedded in French society, as evidenced by the rising popularity of the far-right National Front—and its “calls for the eviction of non-white immigrants from France” and treatment of “French-born Arabs and Blacks as noncitizens”—in the 1980s.

Read: I tried to be a communist

Subjects are introduced in chronological order, with Walker making deft connections across chapters and narratives by mapping changes in policies, movements, and prevailing social attitudes in the United States, as well as in the other countries. The chapter about Richard Wright’s time in Argentina, for example, lays out how the threat of political and financial backlash from the United States kept other nations (including France) from hosting film adaptations of Native Son. The censorship followed Wright outside American borders: Spanish-language translations of the film were titled Sangre Negra, or “Black Blood,” rather than Hijo Nativo, which might have engendered more audience identification with its protagonist.

The first chapter points the reader toward the Washington, D.C.–born singer and actor Florence Mills, who made her Paris debut in 1926, when she was 30 years old. By then, Mills had been performing for two decades across the United States, earning rave reviews in productions such as the all-Black Broadway musical Shuffle Along. But Mills knew that Broadway success would not carry her to Hollywood, as it had for white actors. When the impresario of Blackbirds, the revue she’d been headlining, signed the cast up for a Paris run, Mills took a chance on moving to the city where she’d heard of more opportunities for Black singers, vaudeville acts, and cabaret performers.

Upon making her debut in France, Mills immediately drew comparisons to Josephine Baker, whose influence on modern cultural production is ubiquitous. But in recounting Mills’s years in Europe, Walker expands upon that narrow resemblance. Part of what makes Beyond the Shores so satisfying is Walker’s vivid depictions of the environments that her subjects entered when they immigrated. Their stories are rendered not solely through what they produced, but also through what they saw, what they ate, what they must have felt. Walker describes the pillars of diasporic nightlife that earned parts of 1920s Paris the nickname “French Harlem,” where “patrons could dance to Martinican biguines, which derived from the folk songs of the enslaved, Senegalese orchestra tunes that included elements of Cuban music that traveled to African airways and migrated to France, and even some African American jazz.”

View of American author Richard Wright as he walks in the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, France, 1959 (Gisele Freund/Photo Researchers History/Getty)

In such a setting, Mills and her fellow performers could move through everyday life—and toward bigger stages—without being hobbled by the crushing weight of Jim Crow. The Black press in America took note: One headline from the New York Amsterdam News read, “Colored Artists Holding Sway and Being Treated Like Human Beings by the French.” Walker takes care to complicate such assessments, enumerating the organizations in France that were fighting anti-Blackness on their home turf even as American performers garnered acclaim. And of course, Mills’s time in Paris was not without moments of overt discrimination, especially when a local economic downturn led to an influx of white American patrons at bars and cafés. Walker approaches these points of difficulty with empathetic rigor, as she does with moments of discomfort between Black Americans and other Black people they encountered in their travels. The American passport functions, in some instances, as a totem of whiteness: “In Nigeria, locals alternately called African American Peace Corps volunteers ‘white black’ and ‘native foreigners,’” Walker writes, “while Cameroonians referred to one volunteer as a ‘Black white woman.’”

With each story, Beyond the Shores builds a canon of Black creative expression that crosses both temporal and geographic barriers. “Bringing Florence back into the mainstream spotlight does more than simply renew attention to her remarkable life and career,” Walker writes. “It’s an opportunity to remember that Baker was just one of countless African American performers who made their way to the City of Light, left indelible marks on its cultural landscape, and turned it into a destination for new forms of music, dancing, and cross-cultural mingling that would be felt for decades to come.” Walker threads Beyond the Shores together with excavations of her own family’s journeys too: In the book’s prologue, she explains how hearing about her grandfather’s service abroad in World War II prompted some of her earliest childhood questions about Black migration. As others’ stories unfold, so does her own, giving the book the feel of a travel memoir without ever losing the gravity of a historical compendium. The interplay deepens the book’s storytelling; by observing the past through the lives of others, she seems to suggest, we can imagine an alternate vision of our own future.

On the spot credit card or cash fines for drugs will range from €200 to €2,500.

Actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney have found another European sports team to support. Their soccer loyalties still lie with Welsh team Wrexham FC, but in the Formula 1 world, it’s the French Alpine team owned by Renault Group that won their favors—and cash—this time.

Read more...