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

CHAPTER 3 “No One, I Am Sure, Is Ever Homesick in Paris”: Jessie Fauset’s French Imaginary

CHAPTER 3 “No One, I Am Sure, Is Ever Homesick in Paris” Jessie Fauset’s French Imaginary Claire Oberon Garcia Paris in 1925 witnessed several events that have become iconic moments in conventional histories of modernism: Josephine Baker arrived in Paris with the Revue Nègre; Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald met for the first time in the Ritz Hotel bar; the International Exhibition of Arts Décoratifs showed the world what modern looked like; and Picasso painted his Three Graces. Mentioned less often in narratives of modernism is the encounter between Anna Julia Cooper and Jane Nardal that took place on March 23, 1925, in the Salle du Doctorat at the Sorbonne. Cooper, 65, was an American public high-school teacher who had been born in slavery. The black-gowned woman stood alone before the elevated seats of three male “jurors” to defend her dissertation (Keller 5). Her thesis, L’Attitude de la France à l’égard d’esclavage pendant la Révolution, though written in a carefully dispassionate, academic style, went against the grain of French historical scholarship in that it placed the issue of slavery at the center of an analysis of the French revolution. Her work suggested that the conditions for European modernity were created through relationships of power between Europeans and people of color.1 Working out of a lifelong Jessie Fauset’s French Imaginary 79 commitment to bringing “the feminine flavor” to scholarly inquiry (Cooper, The Third Step, 3–4 quoted in Keller), Cooper’s dissertation reminded historians that “enslaved blacks in Sainte-Domingue are a flesh-and-blood living negation of [France’s] noble principles” (May 114), and that narratives of revolution in Europe could not be disentangled from issues of slavery and domination. The presence of this middle-aged black woman in such a venerable public arena was itself a living challenge to contemporary constructions of race and gender in France, in that it instantiated a black woman’s determination to inscribe her own historical agency. As an education reformer and political activist, Cooper spent her long career resisting and re-writing limiting narratives imposed upon women and people of color. Cooper’s new interpretation of the French Revolution, which involved remapping the power relationship between the metropole and its colonies and foregrounding African-descended people as agents of French history, rather than merely its subjects, prefigured the questions and concerns of a younger generation of black women who crossed the Atlantic to study in Paris during the interwar years. As an effect of the increased interest in African American culture and education during the 1920s, dozens of New Negro women from the United States had their studies in France underwritten by sororities or foundations . They joined the first generation of women from the Antilles who, as their sisters had customarily done, sailed to the hexagon to achieve university degrees in preparation for professional careers. As Jenny Alpha writes in her autobiography, Paris Créole Blues, “Mes parents voulaient que je quitte la Martinique, pour continuer mes etudes. . . . [M]es parents voulaient que j’aille à la université pour devenir professeur, ou à la rigueur que je travaille à la douane ou à la poste comme eux” (My parents wanted me to leave Martinique to continue my studies. . . . My parents wished that I might go to university to become a teacher, or if need be, to work in the customs or post office, as they did) (51). Watching Cooper from the gallery was a young Martiniquaise who was also studying at the University of Paris, Jane Nardal. Nardal , who later described herself as someone who had been, until that moment, “une bonne négresse française,” wrote of the transformative power of this scene two years later in a letter to Alain Locke, as she was asking Locke’s permission to translate his anthology, The New Negro. “Pourtant,” she wrote, “ma curiosité, mon intéret, déja sollicité par d’autres faits négres, commencaient à s’éveiller” (Nevertheless my curiosity, my interest, already drawn out by other negro accomplishments, began to awaken).2 For Nardal, the moment was a catalyst for her own discovery of and dedication to a transna- 80 Claire Oberon Garcia tional “ésprit de race” founded upon common origins in Africa that she later explored in her own writing and political activism. Nardal believed that her generation of scholars would use their European educations to study the spirit and history of...