Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading multiple books set in Marseille. Specifically, I have read two novels detailing the movement of refugees during World War II to the port city in hopes of escaping the Nazi advance. Before leaving for Marseille, I read Julie Orringer’s The Flight Portfolio…

Technically, I’m from the Deep South. However, I consider my hometown in Northwest Louisiana more of East Texas instead of the South. I grew up in Shreveport, a city with a long history of music, civil rights activism, and racial violence. There’s a statue of Leadbelly downtown. The Louisiana Hayride…

Over the past two posts, I’ve been sharing my journal entries from the study travel trip I led to France a couple of weeks ago. Today, I want to finish up this series by sharing a short post from the beach overlooking the Mediterranean in Nice and a post about…

Last post, I shared the first journal entry for my “Black Expatriate Writers in France” class. Today, I’m going to share the second and third entries from May 12, 2023 and May 16, 2023. I wrote the first entry after we moved from Avignon to Marseille and the second on…

During our “Black Expatriate Writes in France” course, I had students journal and reflect upon their travels. I decided to keep a journal as well, and to this point, I have done three entires. The first one in Avignon took me a few days, because of various things, but I…

It’s taken me years to finally getting around to reading James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and I am disappointed that I waited this long to read it and let alone teach it. When my “Black Expatriate Writers in France” course got approved, I knew I wanted to teach Baldwin. I could…

Over the past few posts, I have been looking at the tensions that Simeon feels in William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face. Simeon leaves the United States for France, seeking refuge and escape from the racist oppression of white supremacy. He finds, as other African American expatriates do within the…

William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face, as I have written about over the past few posts, revolves around the tension that Simeon feels about living in Paris as the Civil Rights Movement occurs back in the United States. Simeon’s conflict arose partly from Smith’s own experiences as an expatriate…

Recently, I’ve been looking at “whiteness” in William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face. Today, I want to continue that discussion by looking further at Simeon’s interactions with Ahmed and Hossein, specifically on going to Hossein’s apartment in Paris. While Simeon, earlier in the novel, recognizes, through his “double perspective,” the…