Bricktop's Paris
Subtitle: African American women in Paris between the two World Wars
By: T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting
Publisher: State University of New York Press; SUNY Press
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 377
ISBN-13: 9781438455013
Subjects: Social life and customs; Intellectual life; Nightclubs; Americans; Women entertainers; African American women; Biography; History
Description: 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. 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The other Americans, 1919-1939; title: Les Dames, grand and small, of Montmartre : the Paris of Bricktop; title: The Gotham-Montparnasse exchange; title: Women of the Petit Boulevard : the artist's haven; title: Black Paris : cultural politics and prose; title: "Homeward tug at a poet's heart" : the return; title: Appendix. "Negro Dance," opus 25, no. 1 / Nora Douglas Holt; title: Gained in translation? / Alice Randall; title: History's marginalia, autofictional mysteries, and a fondness for matters French / T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting; title: The autobiography of Ada "Bricktop" Smith, or Miss Baker regrets / Ada "Bricktop" Smith and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting.