Within the new kind of open, complex and mobile society, small groups in any form of

divergence or dissent could find some kind of foothold.”13 Paris is crucial because it allowed

boundary crossing, conversations, and collaborations that were available nowhere else to the

same degree. At the same time the city resonates in the cultures of black internationalism

because it came to represent certain kinds of crossings, certain extensions of the horizon, even

for populations that did not travel. I attempt at organizing alliances to challenge the prevailing

discourses of Western universalism), those cultures are equally “adversarial” to themselves,

highlighting differences and disagreements among black populations on a number of registers.

The larger point is that one can approach such a project only by attending to the ways that

discourses of internationalism travel, the ways they are translated, disseminated, reformulated,

and debated in transnational contexts marked by difference

Black internationalism—and modes of imagining transnational migrancy— were not necessarily

limited by class in the ways one might expect. They were not confined to the corridors of elitism,

to conversations among the Talented Tenth in rarefied venues such as the sparsely attended Pan-

African Congresses or Paulette Nardal’s salon, where a dozen or two sipped tea. Nor, inversely,

were they limited to the vagabond dreams of the men who attempted to evade or resist class

interpellation, improvising transnational bands at Europe’s best back door. During World War I,

about 370,000 African Americans served in the segregated American Expeditionary Force in

France, France simultaneously imported a labor force from the colonies.

In 1926 there were still at least 10,000 Caribbean students and workers and 1,500 black African

workers in Paris alone, along with hundreds of African American visitors and expatriates.11
After the war, tales of encounter and connection, forged in the trenches and on the docks,

traveled back to the United States with the American fighting forces. It is important to recognize

that the significance of Paris in this period is not a question of sheer population size. Instead, as

Raymond Williams has argued, the European metropole after the war provided a special sort of

vibrant, cosmopolitan space for interaction that was available neither in the United States nor in

the colonies. It allowed “a complexity and a sophistication of social relations, supplemented in

the most important cases—Paris, above all—by exceptional liberties of expression. . . . [Within

the new kind of open, complex and mobile society, small groups in any form of divergence or

dissent could find some kind of foothold.”13 Paris is crucial because it allowed boundary

crossing, conversations, and collaborations that were available nowhere else to the same degree.

At the same time the city resonates in the cultures of black internationalism because it came to

represent certain kinds of crossings, certain extensions of the horizon, even for populations that

did not travel.