In his exploration of Henri Lefebvre's concept of the right to the city, geographer Mark Purcell reminds us that

Of course, enfranchisement means benefiting from civil privileges that are not accessible to a large proportion of the black female population in Paris. Despite living out the routines of their everyday lives in the spaces of the French capital, many women of African origin are prevented from enjoying the right to the city because of their low and sometimes precarious economic and legal status. The same cannot be said of the protagonists of Léonora Miano's 2010 novel, Blues pour Élise [Blues for Elise]. Set in 2008, the text describes the everyday lives of a group of black women friends living in Paris. Like the four women in the well–known American sitcom alluded to in my title, Miano's four main protagonists are intelligent, financially independent and beautiful. As in Sex and the City, it is the relationships between the different characters that generate the narrative: intimate stories about sex and sexuality, family feuds and family secrets along with descriptions of other common features of everyday life such as trips to the hairdressers and house–warming parties, all combine to create a kind of black French literary sitcom. And yet, through the various emotional intrigues it describes, Blues pour Élise paints a radically new picture of black women in twentyfirst– century Paris. In this text, Miano's women are not disenfranchised, marginalized ‘immigrants’ but rather enfranchised urbanites who participate in and appropriate the city spaces they inhabit. This chapter will discuss the ways in which Miano celebrates and advocates the right to the city for contemporary black women in Paris and, in so doing, promotes her vision of an Afropean community.

In Chapter 2 of Blues pour Élise, we travel to an area of Paris with a relatively high Afro–Caribbean population: the 10th arrondissement, more specifically the boulevard de Strasbourg.