T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting 
Bricktop’s Paris [EPUB ebook] 
African American Women in Paris between the Two World Wars

2015 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title
Longlisted for the 2015 American Library in Paris Book Award



During the Jazz Age, France became a place where an African American woman could realize personal freedom and creativity, in narrative or in performance, in clay or on canvas, in life and in love. These women were participants in the life of the American expatriate colony, which included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Cole Porter, and they commingled with bohemian avant-garde writers and artists like Picasso, Breton, Colette, and Matisse.
Bricktop’s Paris introduces the reader to twenty-five of these women and the city they encountered. Following this nonfiction account, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting provides a fictionalized autobiography of Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith, which brings the players from the world of nonfiction into a Paris whose elegance masks a thriving underworld.

Table des matières

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

The Women

Map of Bricktop’s Paris

Map Key




Book I. Bricktop’s Paris



Introduction: The Other Americans, 1919–1939



1.
Les Dames, Grand and Small, of Montmartre: The Paris of Bricktop



2. The Gotham-Montparnasse Exchange



3. Women of the Petit Boulevard: The Artist’s Haven



4. Black Paris: Cultural Politics and Prose



5. Epilogue: “Homeward Tug at a Poet’s Heart”: The Return




Appendix: “Negro Dance, ” Opus 25, No. 1, Nora Douglas Holt




Book II. The Autobiography of Ada “Bricktop” Smith or Miss Baker Regrets



Foreword: Gained in Translation?


Alice Randall



Preface: History’s Marginalia, Autofictional Mysteries, and a Fondness of Matters French


T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting



The Autobiography of Ada “Bricktop” Smith,
or Miss Baker Regrets


Ada “Bricktop” Smith and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting



Glossary (Book II)

Notes to Book I

List of Archives and Libraries

Selected Bibliography

Index to Book I

A propos de l’auteur

T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor of French and African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the coeditor of
Black France/France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness and the translator of a collection of Paulette Nardal’s essays,
Beyond Negritude: Essays from Woman in the City, also published by SUNY Press.