Jessie Redmon Fauset’s “Comedy: American Style” and the Psychological Impact on Racism

As I was constructing my syllabus for my upcoming “Black Expatriate Writers in France” syllabus, I wanted to make sure I had at least one text by an African American woman author. Since I as focusing on the South of France, specifically Provence (Avignon, Marseille, and Nice), I wanted texts that either took part, entirely, in the region or partly in the region. I did not want texts squarely situated in Paris. Finding these texts, apart from Claude McKay’s novels, was rather difficult. I chose James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room because David heads to Nice and we see him there in the space he rented. Even though William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face solely takes place in Paris, I chose it because of its connections with with the treatment of Algerians and other French colonial subjects that Jessie Redmon Fauset, Baldwin, and McKay address in their work.

Thinking about the connections and threads between texts, I ultimately chose Fauset’s Comedy: American Style as one of the novels for the class. The action in Fauset’s novel mainly occurs in the United States, but some of it does take place in Toulouse, France, and a very small portion is set in Toulon, which is between Marseille and Nice. Fauset’s novel deals with the social constructions of race and exists within the passing novel genre, even though…