The Pan-Mediterranean Marseille

In just a couple of weeks, we’ll be leaving for the South of France for my “Black Expatriate Writers in France” course. While I have read all of the texts I’m teaching in that course, I’ve also started to dive into other texts in preparation for the trip. Specifically, I reread Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, and I finally read, even though it takes place in Northern France, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. I started, as well, to look more into France’s colonialism and specifically its relationship to Algerian and the Algerian war in Alister Horne’s The Savage War of Peace. I plan to look at a few more texts before I travel, notably Alphonse Daudet’s Tartarin of Tarascon and Julie Orringer’s The Flight Portfolio, both of which take place in Marseille. Right now, I am finishing up Nicolas Hewitt’s Wicked City: The Many Cultures of Marseille, and Hewitt’s book in bringing a lot of things to mind as I prepare for this trip.

Reading Hewitt’s book, which focuses specifically on Marseille from the nineteenth century through the twentieth, I am constantly thinking about the similarities that I see with France’s second largest city and New Orleans, Louisiana. These correlations aren’t one-to-one, but there are numerous correlations that I see between each of these port cities. Both exist at the intersections of culture and both arose, in many ways, from the exploitation of others…