During the World Wars of the twentieth century, many African American men traveled to France with the U.S. Army. The stories they brought home about their experience of equitable treatment among the French laid the foundation for a myth about a color-blind France that persists today.

Sustaining that myth and building its glamour, many notable African American creative artists-from actress Josephine Baker to writers Richard Wright and James Baldwin-made their home in Paris in the years between and after the wars.

This summer, African American graduate student Edwin Hill is "following in their tracks" to France, drawn by the myth they created. He hopes to learn more about the historical moment in France-from the 1930s through the 1960s-when Paris was a place where Africans from America, the Caribbean, and Africa-people of "different social classes, different ethnicities, and different histories, all in Black skin, were trying to learn from one another." In France, "they could meet with one another in a seemingly neutral space," Edwin says. "It was an interesting moment of synergy between the intellectual, aesthetic, and political life."

Edwin is interested in all three arenas: Black theorists and writers from the Caribbean-for example, Frantz Fanon, who critiqued constructions of colonial identity, and Aimé Césaire, who wrote poems and essays that inspired oppressed people worldwide; the French fascination with black diasporic musical genres and performers like Baker and Alexandre Stellio (Antillean); and what Edwin calls "the politics of sound." In the process of exploring these issues, he hopes to gain insight into the myth of a color-blind France and the complex ways in which it compared to reality.  .

For example, in her films, Josephine Baker often played a performer who fell in love with a white French man. "Her characters would come to France and find success as black colonial performers in Paris. But while the audiences loved her, largely because of her exotic origins, those same origins made her an unacceptable choice for the French man she loved," Edwin says, "so her success was always ambiguous and somewhat tragic." One film ended, he says, with Baker performing as a bird in a cage.

While this is a rather negative depiction of Africanness, it's hard to say whether it reflects Baker's own experience, because she created a personal mythology about who she was, walking down the streets of Paris with cheetahs on a leash. Also, even if her life were honestly reflected in her films, there was another side to her experience: Her celebrity gave her economic clout, Edwin notes, and let her "make statements that wouldn't have gotten heard otherwise."

Baker's experience of Paris was certainly different from the experiences of those Blacks who came to Paris as students, and not all Blacks who came to France felt the same about their temporary home. Edwin points out that Africans from French colonies in the Caribbean were more ambivalent about the "liberty and opportunity that might exist in France that don't exist" at home. While they might have enjoyed the open and accepting atmosphere of Paris, they also saw France as a colonial power that refused to give their island homelands independence.

One of those French colonies is Guadeloupe, which was the birthplace of a musical art form called biguine. Drawing on his experience as a percussionist-he has an undergraduate degree in musical performance-Edwin examines how the calypso-like biguine, a dance and musical genre with creole lyrics on topics ranging from love and daily relationships to current events and political commentary, became a craze in Jazz Age Paris. He also asks "why jazz was so successful, and biguine didn't enjoy as long a run."

Music (especially rhythm and drums) was often related to ideas about blackness, which seemed to play an important role in the French cultural imagination during the period Edwin is studying. Society was experiencing dramatic technological change-films with sound, radio, automobiles-and Blackness seemed to represent "an authentic, fundamental being that the French themselves had left behind," he says. In effect, they were defining what it meant to be French by contrasting themselves with people of African heritage.

Edwin's grant-supported year of travel, which begins this summer, is not his first visit to France. After graduating in music from the University of Iowa, he studied French literature-with French students-at the Université du Mans. Inspired by the full immersion program, he wrote back to Iowa to apply for the master's degree program in French literature. During those studies, he spent another period in France-this time in Rennes, working as a teaching assistant in an English conversation course-solidifying his French-speaking skills.

It wasn't until he arrived at UCLA to study Francophone literature with Professor Françoise Lionnet that all of his interests came together. "Edwin has developed an enviable ability to cross disciplinary boundaries between music, the humanities, and the social sciences," says Professor Lionnet, who is his adviser. "While at UCLA, he has taken courses in French, comparative literature, anthropology, and musicology, and he is continuing to hone the exceptional skills that will serve him well in an increasingly challenging academic culture that puts a high premium on solidly grounded and theoretically strong interdisciplinary work and teaching."

Because his work is interdisciplinary, "it takes a long time to figure out how everything will fit together," Edwin says, but working across disciplines-especially at a major university like UCLA, also "has opened up new intellectual avenues for me." When he completes his dissertation, Edwin will seek an academic position. "I'm hoping to find a place where I can continue to do the kind of work I've done here."

Published in Spring 2004, Graduate Quarterly