ABSTRACT
Significantly William Gardner Smith cites how Europe in general, not just France, became for black expatriates potential sites for their foreign settlement; whereas after World War I most blacks looked primarily to France as a symbol of freedom. Unlike earlier periods of black expatriates, post-War France was unique because it brought together the major, black prose writers of the day. Smith connected the French scene of expatriates with the growing black and “third world” revolutions in Africa and Asia. Smith not only cites similar motives for why the black expatriates left the US relative to their predecessor,—to escape racism—but he also documents their greater historical awareness of the race problem in terms of its “seeming insolubility”. Smith was an important transitional writer who best embodied how black writers began to shift attention away from post-War European expatriation toward identifying more with an African and Asian perspective.
