Black Paris: The African Writer's Landscape.

Black Paris: The African Writer's Landscape by Benetta Jules-Rosette University of Illinois Press, September 2000, $17.95, ISBN 0-25-06935-8

Jules-Rosette paints an exotic, gritty tableau spanning decades and continents. Here African writers elucidate their worlds. The Parisian Negritude movement is juxtaposed against revolutionary writing, and often the reservations of African American literary giants, including James Baldwin and Richard Wright. Her study of African writers in Paris displays a confident grasp of their diverse and complex ideas, while effectively capturing sentiment, language and culture in one fell swoop.

Readers bear witness to the city of Josephine Baker, boxer Jack Johnson and French intellectuals Jean-Paul Sartre and Andre Gide, as it evolves into the Paris of Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks and later Veronique Tadjo, Jean Paul Baptiste and Simon Njami. Interviews, poetry and insightful essays make Black Paris a gold mine for anyone with a thirst for black culture and an interest in African literature and Pan-Africanism. Listening closely, one can hear the fierce pride of these writers struggling to make their voices heard--and to speak in one unified "African voice"--while remaining true to their individual perspectives.

Idriys Emanuel Pierson is a former Detroit News staff writer, currently freelancing and putting the finishing shine on a science fiction mystery novel.