The proliferation in recent decades of critical work devoted to the cultural and political life of inter-war ‘black France’ attests to a growing recognition of the role of transatlantic travel in the rise of an international black movement. Scholars of Negritude and African American literature and culture of the period from the 1920s to the 1950s have focused on the French capital in particular so as to elucidate the manner in which dynamic transnational interaction and cultural and intellectual exchange contributed to new versions of black identity during this period. For Brent Hayes Edwards, the transnational and ‘translated’ perspective afforded by the emphasis on 1920s ‘Paris noir’, for example, permits an important shift away from the ‘U.S-bound themes of cultural nationalism, civil rights protests, and uplift in the literary culture of the “Harlem Renaissance”’ that characterizes much of the critical work on African American culture of this period. Indeed, as Edwards points out, attending to the particular nature of Paris-based black internationalism reveals the Harlem Renaissance to be ‘merely the North American component of something larger and greater’. In his book, Black France: Colonialism, Immigration and Transnationalism, Dominic Thomas also underscores the defining role played by Paris as a nexus for a diverse range of ideas that led not just to new ways of conceiving blackness but also to new conceptions of national boundaries and identities.

Undoubtedly, this convergence on Paris as a crucial point of intersection for black culture is an important critical development.