Black Expatriates Research Articles

Florence’s Place: Host(ess)ing Revolution in Interwar Black Paris

Florence’s Place: Host(ess)ing Revolution in Interwar Black Paris Marina Magloire (bio) On january 3, 1932, the performer florence emery jones died of heart failure in her Manhattan apartment.1 She was thirty-nine years old. Her death certificate declared that she was an “actress” and that she had been a resident of New York City for twenty-five years.2 It mentions nothing of the fact that she had spent most of the 1920s in Paris, nor that she was once celebrated as one of the most glamorous entertainers of the Parisian nightclub scene. This same Florence who died in a New York tenement once strolled between champagne-laden tables in a Parisian nightclub that bore her name, crooning sweetly; this same Florence once coerced a British prince into dancing the black bottom; this same Florence was, according to Langston Hughes, the first person of color he ever saw “deliberately and openly snubbing white people.”3 Florence walked a delicate balance between white admiration and white hatred, as evidenced by her interactions with Ernest Hemingway, a frequent visitor to her establishments. Hemingway describes her as “a typical Negro dancer, jolly, funny, and wonderful on her feet.”4 That is, until she “acquired an English accent and a languid manner” as a result of dancing with European nobility, and for Hemingway, “another of the really amusing after-midnight places was ruined by prosperity.”5 Hemingway’s characterization of Florence has multiple racist overtones: the assumption that she is solely a dancer, the idea that a black woman’s usefulness is only insofar as she provides him with amusement, and the derision of any black affect other than servile jolliness as a ridiculous putting on of airs. However, what is most remarkable about the themes brought up by Hemingway is the way they were used by other black expatriates of the time period to paint Florence as a cautionary tale of black women’s haughtiness. [End Page 23] After Florence’s decade of license and luxury, it might seem that dying in a New York tenement was a fall from grace. Langston Hughes, while narrating the height of Florence’s success in 1924 in his autobiography, felt the need to foreshadow her demise: “Ten years later, Florence was dying on Welfare Island in New York,” while her rival hostess, Bricktop, “was the toast of the town, with dukes and princes at her tables.”6 While Hughes speaks to the vicissitudes of black women entertainers’ success during the interwar era as directly tied to performance, self-presentation, and race politics, he fails to fully appreciate and conceptualize Florence’s attitude toward her rich white patrons as an act of resistance. Effectively, he subtly undermines her model of inhospitable hostessing and valorizes Bricktop’s more diplomatic model of hostessing at Florence’s expense. This representation has had long-lasting effects on Florence’s historical legacy, which has been obscured in comparison to Bricktop’s. Building on work by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, William A. Shack, and Brent Hayes Edwards, all of whom have situated Florence as a key player among African American expatriate performers in Paris, I use archives and historical accounts to triangulate her position and to read the written traces of Florence’s world in order to reconstruct the politics of her nightly performances.7 More specifically, I argue that Florence’s performance and practice laid claim to a symbology of black leadership in order to make her nightclub a space of resistance to mirror the political climate of the 1920s. While black nationalism was on the rise during the interwar period, and was often represented by its critics in magico-religious terms, very few of these critiques of interwar black leadership considered the notion that black women could be leaders or agents of revolution. Far from being a failure, Florence’s behavior was a masterful insertion of black femininity within a revolutionary matrix. As the hostess at two Paris nightclubs—first Le Grand Duc, where Langston Hughes was also working as a busboy, then at a larger club called Chez Florence—Florence attempted to radicalize the clubs. In these spaces, Florence unified the seemingly dissonant imagery of...

Stress, Burnout, and Turnover Issues of Black Expatriate Education Professionals in South Korea: Social Biases, Discrimination, and Workplace Bullying.

The purpose of this study is to understand expatriate educators’ overall teaching experiences and opinions about living in South Korea. The research study sought to explore the relationship between stressors and social biases against Black individuals and their suicidal behaviours and turnover decisions. The approach of stress, burnout, career decision, and suicide guided this study as the lens. The research method for this study included a phenomenological analysis of two sessions of semi-structured interviews with 18 Black expatriates in the field of education in South Korea. The results indicate that their experiences were impacted by unfairness against individuals based on their skin colour and nationalities. The outcomes of this study highlight the major difficulties experienced by foreign professionals living in South Korea. They can be used by human resource professionals, school administrators, and government leaders to reform their current policy and improve expatriate experiences so as to prevent turnover.

Chester B. Himes: A Biography

Chester B. Himes: A Biography

Traveling Figures and Figures of Travel in “The Arkansas Testament”: Derek Walcott's Quarrel with the American South

This article argues that Derek Walcott’s title poem from the Arkansas Testament (1987), a poetic sequence in which he debates acquiring American citizenship, plays with contrasts of scale—both in literal, geographical terms and on the micro-level of poetic figures—to record his complex allegiances to America and to his native St. Lucia. In addition to contrasts of scale, which themselves imply dynamism and movement, Walcott employs metaphors of travel and transportation, figures which also migrate across his poetic sequences. He uses these kinetic figures to document what the United States, as both historical place and artistic abstraction, comes to represent for him as a black expatriate. One of Walcott’s greatest influences, W.B. Yeats, famously wrote that “We make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” Recording his quarrel with himself, Walcott uses the language of poetry to weigh the relative sizes of his conflicting concerns: can he, in good conscience, become an American given the racial history of the US South? Regardless of America’s potential for racial progress, is citizenship necessarily a betrayal, or diminution, of his Antillean origins? Caught in the self-proclaimed paradox of existing as insider and outsider, traveler and potential citizen, local writer and global figure, Walcott troubles these same categories. Turning to the mobility of metaphor and to his poetry’s dramatic juxtapositions of scale, Walcott asks not only whether he can acquire US citizenship but whether he can belong—or wants to belong—to a Global South.

The Failure of Categories: Haitians in the United Nations Organization in the Congo, 1960–64

The Failure of Categories: Haitians in the United Nations Organization in the Congo, 1960–64 Regine O. Jackson The 1960s was a tumultuous decade in world history, especially across the continent of Africa where almost thirty European colonies were dismantled. Although experiences and obstacles varied by country, colonial withdrawal opened up new opportunities for African nationalists as well as black expatriates.1 Activists and radicals from the United States and the Caribbean flocked to postcolonial Africa, along with businessmen and investors seeking to capitalize on promises of development. Kevin Gaines, whose work has become indispensable to the history of black internationalism, documents the experiences of African Americans in Ghana: Professionals, and technicians seeking refuge from constrained opportunities . . . were welcomed by Nkrumah, who, perhaps more than any other African head of state of his time, encouraged blacks from the Western world to emigrate and lend their skills to building the new nation.2 While Ghana stands out, according to Gaines, because Kwame Nkrumah made it a “destination of radical hope” for black expatriates,3 the Congo was also a significant site for different reasons. In what became known as the “Congo Crisis,” former colonial governments and international organizations played decisive roles in the transition to independence as well as in the experiences of the individuals whose diasporic subjectivities led them to Africa. The United Nations and its specialized agencies began recruitment efforts to replace European administrators of African bureaucracies as early as 1958. After the Democratic Republic of Congo achieved independence from Belgium in June 1960, the UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld launched the most extensive and prominent among these efforts: the United Nations Organization in the Congo or ONUC (Organisation des National Unies au Congo).4 For four years, the Civilian Operations Program recruited [End Page 34] French-speaking professionals and technicians from all over the world to help establish the country’s infrastructure and to supplement the small Congolese leadership class. Hundreds of Haitians—teachers, professors, engineers, and doctors—went to Africa as part of the ONUC program. By 1962, Haitian émigrés constituted the second largest contingent of UN staff experts working in the Congo.5 Maurice Dartigue was Chief of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Africa Division. Dr. Athemas Bellerive directed the World Health Organization (WHO) medical team that included several Haitian doctors (see Figure 1). And in 1963, ONUC’s military force was commanded by Max H. Dorsinville.6 A relatively large number of Haitians participated in the UN programs in Benin and Cameroon, as well as in the Congo. Some Haitians spent career lifetimes with their families there. Yet what is known about the experiences of the estimated 7,500 Haitians in African countries amounts to undocumented fragments that have accumulated over time and are repeated in literature and various commentaries. The historiography of post–World War II pan-Africanism focuses primarily on Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa as sites of resistance and black internationalist activism. As Martin and West note, referring to Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and The Practice of Diaspora by Brent Hayes Edwards, “That literature, even in its more recent diasporic and Black Atlantic variations, displays a consistent Afro-Saxon bias.”7 When Haiti is mentioned at all, it is frozen in time in 1804; in popular and scholarly perception, Haiti’s impact on the world is effectively limited to the Haitian Revolution. The connections between Haiti and Africa—and the relationships between Haitian and African peoples—are imagined as largely symbolic, with no attention to the ways Haitian émigrés took tangible, self-determined action on behalf of African sovereignty.8 Equally troubling, Africa only enters the scholarship on Haitian migration in the work of epidemiologists. Here, the “Haitian hypothesis” proliferates, alleging that Haitian people brought AIDS to the United States in the 1970s after returning from Africa.9 The overall effect of these accounts is that Africa is written out of the Haitian diaspora and vice versa. More familiar narratives of migration to North America, Western Europe, and the nearby Caribbean dominate the scholarship, which naturalizes certain sites as destinations for Haitian migrants and for transnational political activity.10 The gaps in the...

Pulping the Black Atlantic: Chester Himes’ A Case of Rape and the Limits of Expatriation

This article examines the early expatriate career of Chester Himes, and his overlooked Paris-set novella A Case of Rape (1956). Scholars have identified postwar Paris as the locus of a ‘Black Atlantic’ cosmopolitanism that allowed African American writers to transcend American racial and literary regimes, and in particular the stigma of black ‘protest’ fiction. By contrast, this article argues that Himes’ exile was paradoxical; defined by an exchange, rather than an ‘exceeding’ of American racial and literary stigmas. First, I explore the fetishistic racial politics that energized the Left Bank’s construction of black expatriates as symbols of individualist, masculine, and specifically western transgression. Second, I examine the way in which A Case of Rape, and its narrative of the false conviction of four African American expatriates for rape, dramatizes this paradox. With supreme irony, the novella sees the expatriate celebrity merge with a central symbol of the African American ‘protest’ novel: the black male rapist of white women. Finally, I argue that A Case of Rape is of particular importance for the ways in which it anticipates Himes’ move into pulp fiction. Like his later detective series, A Case of Rape captures Himes’ own disillusionment with conventional notions of authorial autonomy, and literary instrumentality. I conclude that expatriation worked to galvanize, rather than displace, Himes’ interest in the overdetermination of African American literature within dominant western racial discourses.

Kevin K. Gaines, African Americans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era

Previous articleNext article No AccessBOOK REVIEWSKevin K. Gaines, African Americans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights EraPero Gaglo DagboviePero Gaglo Dagbovie Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 94, Number 3Summer 2009The Legacy of Dr. John Hope Franklin A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/JAAHv94n3p439 Views: 44Total views on this site © ASALHPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Blacks on the border: the black refugees in British North America, 1815-1860

Following the American Revolution, free black communities and enslaved African Americans increasingly struggled to reconcile their African heritage with their American home. This struggle resulted in tens of thousands of African Americans seeking new homes in areas as diverse as Haiti and Nova Scotia. Black refugees arrived in Nova Scotia after the War of 1812 with little in common but their desire for freedom. By 1860, they had formed families, communities, and traditions. Harvey Amani Whitfield's study reconstructs the lives and history of a sizeable but neglected group of African Americans by placing their history within the framework of free black communities in New England and Nova Scotia during the nineteenth century. It examines which aspects of American and African American culture black expatriates used or discarded in an area that forced them to negotiate the overlapping worlds of Great Britain, the United States, Afro - New England, and the African American Diaspora, while considering how former American slaves understood freedom long before the Civil War.

Kevin K. Gaines. American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era. The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xiv + 342 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $34.95. Cloth.

Kevin K. Gaines. American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era. The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xiv + 342 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $34.95. Cloth. - Volume 50 Issue 2

American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era

American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era

KEVIN K. GAINES. American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era. (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2006. Pp. xiv, 342. $34.95

Kevin K. Gaines's book chronicles the sojourn of several notable African Americans (or as the title of his book presents it “American Africans”) in Kwame Nkrumah's newly independent Ghana during the years between formal independence from British colonial rule in 1957 and the military coup that toppled one of Africa's most famous postcolonial leaders in 1966. Some, such as Julian Mayfield, Maya Angelou, and W. E. B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois, lived and worked in Ghana for a considerable time, while others, such as Richard Wright, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, made significant but brief visits to the country that influenced their own political development and consciousness. As Gaines explains, this was not just the period when a “wind of change” was blowing over Africa but a time when the Cold War was raging on that continent and throughout the rest of the world, as newly independent nations such as Nkrumah's Ghana and Patrice Lumumba's Congo were striving to develop economically and to chart an independent political course, build Pan-African unity across the continent, and maneuver between the imperialist ambitions of the superpowers and their allies. This was also the period when the struggle for civil rights in the United States was at its height. The “Afros,” as members of the expatriate African American community sometimes styled themselves, found that the political realities of this period, affected them just as much in exile as if they had remained in the United States.

American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era

American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era

Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era: American Africans in Ghana by Kevin K. Gaines Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Pp. 342. £24.50.

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American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era

American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era

American Africans in Ghana: black expatriates and the civil rights era

This book describes the U.S. civil rights movement and the decolonization of AfricaWhen the West African nation of Ghana gained its independence from British colonial rule in 1957, people of African descent the world over celebrated the new nation as a beacon for their aspirations for freedom and self-determination. Over the next decade, hundreds of African Americans - including Martin Luther King Jr., George Padmore, W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Richard Wright, Pauli Murray, C. L. R. James, and Muhammad Ali - visited or settled in Ghana. Kevin K. Gaines explains what attracted these expatriates to Ghana and how their new community was shaped by the convergence of the Cold War, the rise of the U.S. civil rights movement, and the decolonization of Africa.

Richard Wright's "Island of Hallucination" and the "Gibson Affair"

The "Gibson Affair" marked the height of Cold War paranoia that came to consume the group of black expatriates centered in Paris in the 1950s. In writing of the forgeries and surrounding events that bear his name, Richard Gibson argues that the economy of the scandal was determined as much by the question of political commitment to Algerian independence as it was to the question of affiliations to the United States and its government. The essay combines Gibson's informative memoir with a meditation upon Richard Wright's unpublished roman-a-clef (and only novel set in Paris), Island of Hallucination.

I See France: Priorities in Nonfiction

Research Article| March 01 2003 I See France: Priorities in Nonfiction Edward C. Knox Edward C. Knox Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2003) 49 (1): 12–31. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2003-2007 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Edward C. Knox; I See France: Priorities in Nonfiction. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 March 2003; 49 (1): 12–31. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2003-2007 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2003 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Eugene Bullard: Black Expatriate in Jazz-Age Paris

By any measure, Eugene Jacques Bullard (1895–1969)—best remembered as the first African American fighter pilot—led a remarkable life. Born in Georgia, Bullard was inspired by his father's accounts of France as a country free from racial prejudice, and he stowed away on a merchant ship bound for Europe in 1912. Put ashore in Aberdeen, he went to Liverpool and London, working as a prizefighter and fairground attendant. Moving to France in 1913, Bullard joined the Foreign Legion on his nineteenth birthday and was wounded at Verdun. He subsequently graduated from aviation school and served with distinction in the French Flying Corps, but he was refused a transfer to the U.S. Army Air Corps after America entered the war in 1917. Returning to Paris, Bullard was frequently involved in brawls with white Americans over incidents of racial prejudice. He became a jazz drummer and the owner-manager of a nightclub in Montmartre. His patrons and acquaintances included such Jazz Age luminaries as Sidney Bechet, Anita Loos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Charles Chaplin, Josephine Baker, Mabel Mercer, and the Prince of Wales. In 1923, Bull-ard married into a prominent Parisian family and had two daughters (a son died in infancy). An active member of the French underground, he fled Paris in 1940 following the German occupation and returned to America. For the last thirty years of his life, he lived in Spanish Harlem and held a variety of unskilled jobs. Prominent in New York City's French community, Bullard attempted (unsuccessfully) to involve the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the Free French cause, secured the repatriation of his daughters to the United States, and was severely beaten by thugs at a Paul Robeson concert at Peekskill, New York, in 1949. In 1953 he served as an advance agent and translator for a European tour by Louis Armstrong, and the following year he was invited by the French government to participate in the Bastille Day ceremonies in Paris. On his sixty-fourth birthday Bullard was awarded the Legion of Honor. Appropriately, he was buried with full military honors in the French War Veterans' Cemetery in Flushing, New York.

Eugene Bullard, black expatriate in jazz-age Paris

Eugene Bullard, black expatriate in jazz-age Paris

The Fire this Time: Black American Expatriates and the Algerian War

The Fire this Time: Black American Expatriates and the Algerian War