Love and Suspense in Paris Noir: Navigating the Seamy World of Jake Lamar's Rendezvous Eighteenth

“… I find this project fascinating, as it seeks to accomplish what Lamar attempts in his novel, that is, take a diverse audience on a journey not through the famed City of Light per se, but through another Paris, its underside.”

Trica Keaton, Dartmouth University

"Thompson mines her digital essay with Amine’s purposeful intervention. She embeds links to research that complements the author that she studies. Lastly, Thompson’s digital essay reveals the multi-ethnic and geographically alert awareness. There is a crucial need for this type of academic digital essays in which authors write in an easily lucid manner."

Mark A. Reid, University of Florida

Taking readers on an itinerant journey through Jake Lamar’s novel Rendezvous Eighteenth, Tyechia Thompson, practitioner of Black Paris, explores narratives of African-American expatriates in Lamar’s life, his Paris, and his work. Unfolding in six different paths, this interactive literary analysis pulls together interviews with Jake Lamar and relevant videos, showing Lamar’s chosen setting of the Eighteenth Arrondissement and treatment of race as a departure from contemporary fiction of its type. Introducing the “different side of Paris” through narrator Ricky Jenks, Lamar centers his novel on the lesser known parts of the city, enabling direct challenges to migration narratives of inclusion and racially utopic France. Building a new layer of analysis in each path, Thompson demonstrates a flexible approach to text, showing the complexities of Rendezvous Eighteenth in both form and content.

This title was peer reviewed with a single-blind process by the AFRO-PWW editorial board.

Please cite this book using the DOI 10.21900/pww.3