Routes in the Eighteenth
The practice of “Black American Paris” falls within the realm as an object of study, precisely because of the narratives it has generated and regenerated. And, as much as these narratives rely on race terror in the United States to explain the causes of migration—legitimately so I might add—they must equally depict a tolerant, liberal, and racially utopic France, again, to rationalize being in a country where other African and Asian descended peoples have clearly not been well received, as a plethora of postcolonial literature aptly demonstrates. “‘Black (American) Paris’ and the French Outer-Cities” 99
While Keaton’s perspective is true for many portrayals by African-American expatriates in Paris, in terms of Lamar’s Rendezvous Eighteenth, this perspective does not hold up. Lamar troubles the perspective of France as “tolerant, liberal, and racially utopic,” and I argue that setting his work in the Eighteenth Arrondissement disrupts the typical narrative of black inclusion in Paris explicitly. For Rendezvous Eighteenth has parts of its narrative set in areas that Keaton terms “the other France” (100). Also, in the novel, Lamar identifies “act[s] of racial profiling and violence” that take place in the “other France.” Furthermore, though narratives of inclusion have been “generated and regenerated” for over a century, Lamar’s integration of interracial heterosexual and homosocial relationships on both sides of the Seine challenges narratives and spaces of black inclusion through undermining the Paris paradox.