exam

c. Common Sense

2. Counter hegemony: Dominance is challenged (happens on multiple fronts). Continued, complex, nuanced negotiations

a. See examples: Franklin, Adams, Jefferson (hegemonic dance of what the destined, great American experiment will look like.

3. Americans in Paris module introduces us to hegemonic and counter hegemonic underpinnings of the American experience abroad (1870s-present).

a. Hegemonic: (Croucher and Green)

b. Emigration from U.S.

c. Americans are “elite emigrants”

d. Over 5 million Americans live abroad

e. Emigrants “try to promote and preserve their culture, history, and values of their country of origin” (American exceptionalism)

f. Expats (misnomer)are ambassadors of American culture

g. Transnational ties maintained

h. Build and maintain strong institutions structural support

i. Ties are not just to home and family but to government, US citizens turn to the US government while abroad

j. Mobility—Movement from one location to another

k. Political, social, and economic circumstances

l. Americans privileged travelers. They have choice in movement.

4. Americans in Paris as counter hegemonic-Shifting ideas about America

a. America is usually viewed as a nation of immigrants, not a nation of emigrants

b. Extra-territorial citizenship: difference in identity between countries where they live and “belong”

c. Culture: freedom to explore art extensively

d. Café culture: valuation of time and work

e. Sexuality

f. Race

5. Examples of Americans in Paris

a. Americans in Paris, 1860-1900

i. Visibility: Salons in Paris would show thousands of paintings and sculptures to tens of thousands of visitors

ii. American artists were entranced by two stereotypes about the artist’s life in Paris: the impecunious bohemian and the self-confident flâneur .

1. The bohemian ideal was characterized by Henri Murger starting in the 1840s.

iii. Impressionism:

1. Mary Cassatt, American member of the French Impressionist group

2. French mentors influenced the ideals of American Impressionist painters by maintaining that personal experience was the only appropriate source for subjects. Transcribed freshly and directly.

a. Cassatt, the daily life of women

3. A distinctive version of American Impressionism—combined the solid, substantial forms they had learned to paint in Parisian academies

with a new interest in natural light, luminous color, and flickering brushwork.

b. “The History of Their Lives”

i. 5 arguments about autobiography

1. Limited/singular perspective provided on history by the example of a single consciousness

i. Historical events vs. historical experience

2. Autobiographies focus on a single life rather than a collective life

3. The genre has a self-evident recourse to a linear history

i. History is experienced as continuity, autobiographies are merely segments

4. Autobiographies have obscuring literariness

5. Autobiographies have a frequent distance from events described

ii. Memoirs of Americans in Paris in the 1920s

1. The lost generation

i. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sylvia Beach, and Malcolm Crowley

2. Memoirs told 2 narratives; personal and generational, within the reference of a third, the “lost generation” in Paris

iii. Support of Autobiographies

1. The myth of the story is something that can be gained from

2. The details may be wrong but that should be taken into consideration

iv. Neither problems of subjectivity and objectivity can ever be resolved, nor will we find a satisfactory resolution to the historiographical controversy that lies behind a third objection

v. Subjectivity

1. Quality of being influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions

vi. Objectivity

1. Quality of being true independently of emotions

c. Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company

i. This deals with the topic of Green’s Americans in Paris due to the fact that this was a store/library dedicated to Americans that lived in Paris. 

ii. Publishing for the lost generation

iii. Ernest Hemingway even wrote about Sylvia giving high praise to her talking about how cheerful and loving of a person she was

iv. The writers “home away from home”; received loans from the shop and also received mail at the shop

v. At some time, the store, Shakespeare and Company, had to move to another location due to the overwhelming welcome of Americans and British in Paris. 

vi. The book store allowed some writers to stay at the bookstore (the beds between book shelves), these writers needed to read book and an one-page autobiography for the shop’s archives.

vii. In 1941, The book store is closed when German occupy Paris, Sylvia Beachs refused to sell the book Finnegans Wake to a nazi officier, and she moves the books to another place to avoid the books being confiscated by Germans. And a similar bookstore store was reopened by George Whiteman in 1951, and the name of the original book store is given to Whiteman by Sylvia.

d. Following in the steps of Paris’ Lost Generation

i. Café Culture sites and other locations where the “Lost Generation” used to meet together are still around

ii. Paris locations are left largely unchanged

iii. During the summer-time, the artists would go and stay in smaller villages like Giverny, the home of Claude Monet.

iv. Bohemian ideal was about abandoning creature comforts in order to spend time on their muse

v. A collective group of Americans & European artists who settled in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s 

vi. Expressed emotional disconnect with the world

vii. Thought it was lost because the “inherited values had no place and were no longer relevant in the postwar world”

viii. Their points of views from their publications showed the history and feelings they were experiencing 

ix. Had major impact on modern society and art

e. Baldwin in Paris

i. “This pattern of expatriation was most significant among African-American writers and artists who lived in Paris during the early decades of the Cold War when France seemed to offer an attractive alternative to racial barriers and exclusions in the United.” CITE

ii. Artists sought to change America with what they were writing in Europe. “debate suggests the specific intellectual problem that Baldwin, Wright and other exiles faced when they sought to change America through the books and articles they were writing in Europe.”

iii. Baldwin wanted to resist different categorical identities so he could express himself as an individual. “Baldwin was not much drawn to either of these options, however, mainly because he was eager to resist every category of political, racial or cultural identity that could reify and entrap the individual” “...the expatriate experience in postwar France influenced creative black American writers as profoundly as the exile experience in America influenced creative Europeans.” CITE

f. James Baldwin Article

i. The appeal France

1. Baldwin was a visible minority in the United States due to his race, homosexuality, and his low-income background

2. The arts were more supported in Europe than in the United States, leading to a subsection of Black artists in the Lost Generation to migrate to France to pursue their writing careers

3. The African American community un postwar France included painters, jazz musicians, and novelists. 

ii. Social “Othering”

1. Came back to help advance Civil Rights Movement

2. Ostracized by his Black community for his sexuality, as well as the United States government due to his progressive work (harassed and spied on)

iii. Identity (Cosmopolitanism)

1. With the development of the Jazz Age, Baldwin was able to cultivate a strong identity for Black artists as a whole (with the help of others such as Nina Simone, Sydney Poitier, Lorraine Hansberry)

iv. Contradiction of United States as land of asylum for minorities

1. Though the US welcomed European refugees fleeing poor conditions, they treated their minorities poorly

2. Baldwin grew up in poverty in Harlem, wrote about police brutality

3. Black artists as a whole didn’t only leave for creative freedom, but for safety and social mobility, things which white artists were privileged enough to have in their home country

g. Jazz and the Evolution of Black American Cosmopolitanism

i. Black American Cosmopolitanism- The notion that African Americans could move beyond the local communities they reside, and become involved in a larger more abstract community as a larger whole, joining a larger community of African Americans that only they would appreciate or understand

ii. The “Great Migration” of musicians moving North to Chicago and New York for a better life with more opportunities

iii. Paris was more liberal and a more racially interested environment with greater intercultural and cultural freedom

iv. Jazz was an opportunity for African Americans to embrace their own culture freely and be respected for it, rather than subjugated discriminated against; it expanded their horizons

v. Cosmopolitan entertainment culture that make players from diverse culture work in same venues

vi. Paris provided an escape for African Americans from the harsh racial prejudices of America. In Paris, they did not have to fear how they would be treated for the color of their skin, or for their cultural values. Rather, they seemed to be respected and glorified for the first time in their history. They finally had a place to express their culture and art.

h. In Vogue: Josephine Baker and Black Culture and Identity in the Jazz Age

i. New Orleans was home to the Sophisticated African American Community 

ii. F. Scott Fitzgerald defined the 1920’s as the jazz age making the first time that an African American contribution to the national culture had defined an era. 

iii. Leaders arose to form civil rights groups that began the “New Negro Renaissance” -- lead to the growth of all things to do with the African American population

iv. Paris and other travel abroad helped expose the African American population to outside thinking and continue to expose the flaws in America. 

v. Paris was more liberal and racially integrated than American cities

vi. Greater intellectual and cultural freedom

vii. Baker was seen as a celebrity in Paris

viii. Jazz Age means more than just music

1. major part of the civil rights movement

2. Whole movement transforming the African American culture in the world

ix. Josephine Baker was an American born-French entertainer, French resistance agent, and civil rights activist

x. The gentrification of African Americans since the 50’s has caused a semi-reversal of this Jazz Age

xi. Was not just about music but also about race

xii. Music wars the cultural bridge between the embattled cultures in Europe and the United States. 

6. Use American Studies approach on a cultural artifact (Apesh*t)

7. Provide a biographic context of one of the Americans in Paris

8. Key Themes from film group: Americans in Paris