The main character, Simeon Brown, takes refuge from American racism in France, only to find himself complicit in a racist order of another sort he joins Algerians in their demonstration of October 1961 and witnesses a state-sponsored massacre followed by the arrest of hundreds of peaceful, unarmed demonstrators. The long out-of-print work is a classic Black expatriate novel and one of the very few contemporary works of fiction to represent the 1961 police massacre of Algerians in the streets of Paris. Those words certainly describe the premise of Paris Noire: a novel about black immigrants ( noirs) in post-World War II Paris, the city of love and light, liberated, ripe with possibility and teeming with the tension that arrives with change. The Whitney Humanities Center at Yale brought together-via Zoom-three cultural critics and specialists of the African American diaspora and the Algerian War to discuss the much-anticipated NYRB edition of William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face (1963).
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