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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 May 2022
James Baldwin’s autobiographical essay “Equal in Paris” is a perceptive and often amusing account of the American writer’s first visit to Paris. An aspiring novelist who left America in rage over his experience of the country’s injustice and contempt toward Black Americans, Baldwin is acutely aware of racial prejudice in majority white societies. He tells of his experience of staying in a dilapidated hotel, of being wrongly accused of theft and then imprisoned in a Paris jail for more than a week over Christmas. Baldwin’s astute observations of Parisian life and its institutions, show how as a Black American, he struggles to understand this new cultural environment which like most Western societies, has its own form of racism. But this is also a story of an artist’s search for a new intellectual home where he can breathe freely and write. His new friendships with other artists and observations about cosmopolitan European life, allow him to assess what it means to be an American in Paris. This includes exploring those social attitudes that divide America and Europe and those that are universal.
1 Baldwin, James, “Equal in Paris,” in Collected Essays, ed. Morrison, Toni (New York: Library of America, 1998), 101–16Google Scholar. Hereafter all citations to “Equal in Paris” are parenthetical.
2 Ellery Washington, “James Baldwin’s Paris,” New York Times, January 17, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/travel/james-baldwins-paris.html.
3 Baldwin, James, “Notes of a Native Son,” in Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 87–115Google Scholar, at 98–99.
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6 Kramer, “James Baldwin in Paris,” 28.
7 Washington, “James Baldwin’s Paris.”
8 Washington.
9 Baldwin, “A Question of Identity,” in Notes of a Native Son, 127–39, at 139.
10 Baldwin, “Autobiographical Notes,” in Notes of a Native Son, 3–9, at 9.
11 Cornel West, preface to The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), xiii–xiv, at xiii.
12 Conlon, James, “Cornel West’s Pragmatic Understanding of America,” Journal of Black Studies 48, no. 1 (2017): 26–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 27.
13 Cornel West, “On My Intellectual Vocation,” in The Cornel West Reader, 19–33, at 31.
14 Lynch, Michael F., “Just above My Head: James Baldwin’s Quest for Belief,” Literature and Theology 11, no. 3 (1997): 284–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 284.
15 Lynch, “Just above My Head,” 285.
16 Baldwin, “Autobiographical Notes,” 7.
17 Glenn Davis, “Irving Babbitt: Moral Imagination and Progressive Education,” The Imaginative Conservative (website), August 5, 2010, http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2010/08/irving-babbitt-moral-imagination-and.html.
18 James Baldwin, “Nobody Knows My Name,” in Collected Essays, 137–269, at 142.
19 Baldwin, James, Giovanni’s Room (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 1990), 88Google Scholar.
20 Ben Okri, “A New Dream of Politics,” The Guardian, October 12, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/12/ben-okri-politics-poem-jeremy-corbyn.
