Black American Girls in Paris: Sex, Race, and Cosmopolitanism in Andrea Lee’s Sarah Phillips and Shay Youngblood’s Black Girl in Paris

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This essay examines how Andrea Lee’s Sarah Phillips and Shay Youngblood’s Black Girl in Paris reimagine the sexual freedoms that Paris affords the “American girl.” In so doing, it brings issues of gender, race, and class to bear on the trope of expatriate transformation made popular by Henry James, James Baldwin, and
others. The essay argues that even after the civil rights and feminist movements, black women writers send their protagonists abroad to seek sexual and racial freedoms.