There’s No Place like (Fun) Home

What best describes the status of American Studies in today’s France? Toni Morrison inviting French slammers to declaim their poetry at the Louvre comes to mind immediately. The image of the United States’ foremost Black writer legitimating traditionally marginalized popular verse, and in the bastion of European culture that is France’s premier museum to boot, sparks a series of felicitous paradoxes: the post-emancipation of the colonies comes to the post-colonial, the high brow white man’s m...