Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic: Literature, Modernity, and Diaspora

How black writers’ travel to Paris contributed to the transatlantic circulation of art and ideas.

Paris has always fascinated and welcomed writers. Throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, writers of American, Caribbean, and African descent were no exception. Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic considers the travels made to Paris--whether literally or imaginatively--by black writers. These collected essays explore the transatlantic circulation of ideas, texts, and objects to which such travels to Paris contributed.

Editors Jeremy Braddock and Jonathan P. Eburne expand upon an acclaimed special issue of the journal Modern Fiction Studies with four new essays and a revised introduction. Beginning with W. E. B. Du Bois’s trip to Paris in 1900 and ending with the contemporary state of diasporic letters in the French capital, this collection embraces theoretical close readings, materialist intellectual studies of networks, comparative essays, and writings at the intersection of literary and visual studies. Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic is unique both in its focus on literary fiction as a formal and sociological category and in the range of examples it brings to bear on the question of Paris as an imaginary capital of diasporic consciousness.

Jeremy Braddock is an associate professor of English at Cornell University and the author of Collecting as Modernist Practice, also published by Johns Hopkins. Jonathan P. Eburne is the Josephine Berry Weiss Early Career Professor in the Humanities and an associate professor of comparative literature and English at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Surrealism and the Art of Crime.