The power of place will be remarkable,” so wrote philosopher Aristotle. And for Americans, Paris holds the promise of creative freedom, culture, egalitarianism, and beauty. Thomas Jefferson discovered this in the eighteenth century; Edith Wharton in the nineteenth century; and the Lost Generation – Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein – in the twentieth century, after the devastation of the First World War. Today’s breakout though will focus on the “Other Americans,” namely African Americans, and particularly African American women—the aspiring artists, singers, dancers, novelists, nightclub owners, and the community they forged with other members of the African Diaspora in Paris after the Great War.
1. Why was Paris so evocative to members of the African Diaspora?
2. For the African American women discussed, what did the city symbolize that the United States in the 1920s-1930s did not? Why did many of them return to the US?
