“How does it feel to be a white man?” William Gardner Smith’s “The Stone Face”

Matthew Teutsch
5 min readApr 19

Working on my syllabus for my upcoming “Black Expatriate Writers in France” class, I came across William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face (1963), and even though the course focuses on Southern France (Marseille and Nice), I decided to include Smith’s novel, which is set in Paris, because of its depiction of French colonial racism against Algerians and itd…

Matthew Teutsch

Here, you will find reflections on African American, American, and Southern Literature, American popular culture and politics, and pedagogy.