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A Moveable Beast: Jim Crow in the City of Lights
Book chapter

A Moveable Beast: Jim Crow in the City of Lights

David M. Earle
Jim Crow Modernism, pp.205-218
Oxford University Press
2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/9780197699720.003.0019

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Abstract

Modernism Blackness American audiences Cultural History Literary Criticism Literary History
This chapter considers how white American tourists tried to enforce the color line in Parisian nightclubs and American bars throughout the 1920s and how the debate surrounding this attempt filtered into modernist works. By initially focusing on key African American figures of the Paris scene, such as Eugene Bullard and Bricktop, the chapter argues that the large community of African Americans in Paris were largely overlooked in modernist memoirs, travel guides, and literature unless to codify them through abstracted primitivism or dehumanize them through stereotypes, each more digestible for a white American audience than a Black presence that demanded equality or dignity. Ironically, these modernist texts idealize the scene of modernist production while obscuring racial tensions even as they rely upon Black culture through jazz. Similarly, the construction of Paris as moveable feast celebrates a freedom no longer available in Prohibition America, while attempting to contain the freedoms of African Americans in the bars and cafés of Paris.

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