ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book proposes to be an in-depth study of black American writers who, for whatever reasons, left the United States as expatriates or exiles, notwithstanding the fact that most of them eventually returned. It seeks to discuss who left, where did they go, why did they leave, and why they did or did not return, from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The book is concerned with discovering who the black expatriate writers are? It investigates the expatriate problem as it relates to both Europe and Africa. The book focuses on essential literary and social events that are important: black abolitionists in Great Britain, emigration and colonization, the Harlem Renaissance, the French scene, and black writers in Ghana. Most of these events, or movements, are united by a self-conscious understanding, that they were part of a broader community of exiles or expatriates.
