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Belonging in Exile: James Baldwin in Paris

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2022

Mona Siddiqui
Mona Siddiqui*
Affiliation:
Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies, University of Edinburgh
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Abstract

James Baldwin’s autobiographical essay “Equal in Paris” is a perceptive and often amusing account of the American writer’s first visit to Paris. An aspiring novelist who left America in rage over his experience of the country’s injustice and contempt toward Black Americans, Baldwin is acutely aware of racial prejudice in majority white societies. He tells of his experience of staying in a dilapidated hotel, of being wrongly accused of theft and then imprisoned in a Paris jail for more than a week over Christmas. Baldwin’s astute observations of Parisian life and its institutions, show how as a Black American, he struggles to understand this new cultural environment which like most Western societies, has its own form of racism. But this is also a story of an artist’s search for a new intellectual home where he can breathe freely and write. His new friendships with other artists and observations about cosmopolitan European life, allow him to assess what it means to be an American in Paris. This includes exploring those social attitudes that divide America and Europe and those that are universal.

Keywords

James BaldwinAfrican Americanracismmigrationhomebelonging
Type
Essay Roundtable: An Exchange of Essays with Political Theology
Information
Journal of Law and Religion , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , May 2022 , pp. 244 - 249
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University

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References

1 Baldwin, James, “Equal in Paris,” in Collected Essays, ed. Morrison, Toni (New York: Library of America, 1998), 101–16Google Scholar. Hereafter all citations to “Equal in Paris” are parenthetical.

2 Ellery Washington, “James Baldwin’s Paris,” New York Times, January 17, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/travel/james-baldwins-paris.html.

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