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1.
Introduction
James Baldwin arrived in Paris on the 11 November 1948 with just forty dollars in his pocket. Having grown up in Harlem, the postwar deprivation of the city was probably less of a shock for him than it was for many other American expatriates. In every other respect, however, he was in a very different world. Paradoxically, in this alien country he was able to affirm his identity as an American citizen. This article will discuss the essays in which Baldwin begins to explore the complexity of his national and racial inheritance. Collectively these essays are referred to as the "Paris essays." They include the following: "Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown" (1950), "Stranger in the Village" (1953), "A Question of Identity" (1954), "Equal in Paris" (1955), "Princes and Powers" (1956), "The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American" (1959) and "The New Lost Generation" (1961).1
Previous scholarship on this stage of Baldwin's career has tended to focus on his difficult relationship with Richard Wright.2 Critical biographies by David Leeming and James Campbell acknowledge the importance of these essays, but they give little close attention to the texts themselves.3 Recent anthologies, such as James Baldwin Now (1999) and Re-Viewing James Baldwin (2000), have given these essays comparatively scant attention and tend to focus on the ways in which his work intersects with post-structuralist notions of identity and sexuality.4 This article will build on Lawrie Balfour's emphasis on the importance of recognition in his discussion of Baldwin's essay "Many Thousands Gone," as well as on Ross Posnock's argument that Baldwin plays out a dialectics of stranger and citizen in these texts.5 In the "Paris essays" Baldwin begins to develop some of the key ideas behind his work. He endeavours to resolve the contradiction between his sense of himself as an individual and the determinations of an alienated and alienating racial identity by affirming his American citizenship. This affirmation leads him to radically revise the concept of citizenship and makes his racial identity a source of cultural strength and critical authority. As we shall see, Baldwin conceives of race in dialectical terms, with the African American as the dynamic agent in a process envisaged as leading...