Confronting The Stone Face: The Critical Cosmopolitanism of William Gardner Smith.

Mossner, Alexa Weik von

In one of the key moments of William Gardner Smith's 1963 novel The Stone Face, the African American expatriate Simeon Brown passes near the Odeon metro station in Paris when he is hailed by a man speaking in thickly accented English. "Hey," the stranger shouts, "How does it feel to be a white man?" (Stone Face 55). Simeon is startled at this outburst, and by the laughter of the shouter's companions. After all, he is visibly black, and the four men who are heckling him are light-skinned Algerians. However, although the label seems absurd to him, he recognizes almost instantly that it is true: here, in the Paris of the early 1960s, he is indeed enjoying, in spite of his skin color, the privileges of a white man, and it is the Algerian minority that takes the place of, as one of them puts it, "the niggers" (57). Simeon is deeply shocked at this realization, which at once destroys the illusion of a racial paradise with which Paris so far seemed to present him. The fate of the Algerians in France, he suddenly understands, is different but at the same time similar to the fate of African Americans in the segregated United States; while he himself, as a black American, might be safe and free in Paris, others are not. Simeon's painful recognition about the omnipresence of racism and oppression mirrors that of the novel's author, who made similar experiences and came to similar insights as a black American expatriate in France during the 1950s and '60s.

Once believed to be on the verge of a great literary career, William Gardner Smith faded into obscurity after his death, and his work has received very little attention over the years from scholars of African American literature. His biographer LeRoy Hodges noted in 1985 that Smith was--unjustly--considered a "minor writer" with a "marginal" creative output (i), and despite Hodges's efforts, little has changed since then. However, Smith's work--and particularly his fourth and final novel The Stone Face--deserves more scholarly attention, as Michel Fabre, Paul Gilroy, and Tyler Stovall all have pointed out. (1) Not only is the novel one of few African American texts dealing with the complicated relationship of the black U. S. community in Paris to the so-called Algerian question; it is also an impressive exploration of the difficulties and complexities of intercultural understanding, and of the ways that cosmopolitan sentiments and attitudes are produced and expressed. Smith's protagonist Simeon starts out as a man habituated to American patterns of racism, haunted by his memories of violence and abuse, and rather oblivious to French racialization and discrimination of Algerians. In the course of the story, however, and as a result of his encounters with people he learns to care for, Simeon comes to understand that the inhuman "stone face" of racism--which gives the novel its title--is universal, even if its colors and features vary as much as those of its victims. Simeon's reaction to this realization is to change his understanding of France as a racism-free space and to give up his privileged position as a "white man." Newly politicized, he begins to actively support the Algerian liberation struggle, and, at the end of the novel, decides to return to the U. S. to support the civil rights movement there.

This final moment of "homecoming," Simeon's apparent abandonment of a political conflict in exile in favor of what seems to be a more "domestic" national struggle, is what Paul Gilroy, in Against Race (2000), has termed a "capitulation to the demands of a narrow version of cultural kinship" (323). In Gilroy's view, Smith's choice to send his protagonist "home" to African America significantly damages what is otherwise a powerful story about cosmopolitan personal expansion and universal political commitment. For this reason, Gilroy insists, the novel "does not measure up to the best historical examples yielded by the actual black Atlantic itinerants whose lives might be used today to affirm other, more timely and rewarding choices" (324). Smith was off to an excellent start, Gilroy suggests, but he was not able to deliver in the end. If we want to learn about black cosmopolitanism, we need to look elsewhere.

While I agree with much of Gilroy's exploration and analysis of The Stone Face, I disagree with his conclusion. First, in opposition to Gilroy's final verdict about both Smith and his novel, I will argue that The Stone Face truthfully represents the personal struggle of many African American expatriates during the 1960s, and is therefore quite consistent with the historical examples rendered by actual black Atlantic voyagers, at least insofar as these were U. S. citizens. Second, and perhaps more important, I will show that a more contextual reading of the novel is particularly well suited to help us understand how critical cosmopolitanism must always emerge and exist in reflexive tension with the dominant ideologies of any given venue, including those ideologies of the home country. Simeon's act of solidarity with the Algerian minority at the end of The Stone Face, and his passionate affirmation of a common humanity across all differences, go far beyond simple tolerance and appreciation of foreign or Other cultures--and also beyond the vagueness of a universal political commitment. Rather, they exemplify a critical and reflexive cosmopolitanism, conceived from the perspective of coloniality, which is actively lived and felt in concrete historical situations and thus is inevitably partial and in process. Smith's little-known and underestimated novel deserves scholarly attention because it portrays the emergence of a critically cosmopolitan mind as the direct result of specific sociohistorical circumstances. It is important also because it challenges the supposed barriers between African American and postcolonial studies that scholars such as Paul Gilroy, John Cullen Gruesser, and others have declared unhelpful, encouraging us to see the crucial continuities between the two supposedly separate disciplines--not least when it comes to the issue of cosmopolitanism.

Critical Cosmopolitanism and the (Post-)Colonial

Cosmopolitanism has a long and complex genealogy as a philosophical term. Originally conceived in ancient Greece and significantly developed by Immanuel Kant in the 1790s, the concept has been used and abused in the course of its history to justify European dominance and colonial expansion, and for some of its critics, it continues to be compromised by a Eurocentric--and some say elitist--outlook. Notorious for its universalizing tendencies, a misconceived cosmopolitanism can, despite its professed worldliness, easily lead to exclusive and excluding attitudes and to cultural appropriation and oppression. This is why Bruce Robbins argues in "Comparative Cosmopolitanisms" (1998), that if we want to work with the concept today, we must give "comparative attention to discrepant cosmopolitanisms" from around the globe to avoid a dangerous and reductive ethnocentrism (259). Today, we are thus faced with a remarkable spectrum of cosmopolitanism(s), which differ substantially in their definition of the term, and which unsurprisingly come with a myriad of neologisms and modifiers. (2) One such modified concept is Walter Mignolo's notion of "critical cosmopolitanism," which is particularly important in the context of this essay because it aims to offer a counter-perspective on Eurocentric cosmopolitanism. In "The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism" (2000), Mignolo understands critical cosmopolitanism as a dialogical practice which has to be reconceived from the perspective of those who so far have been forced to live with a globalizing world that others have planned and projected. Critical cosmopolitanism, for Mignolo,

 emerges precisely as the need to discover other options beyond both
 benevolent recognition (Taylor 1992) and humanitarian pleas for
 inclusion (Habermas 1998). Thus, while cosmopolitan projects are
critical
 from inside modernity itself, critical cosmopolitanism comprises
 projects located in the exteriority, and issuing forth from the
colonial
 difference. (724) 

Mignolo here claims that the crucial difference between cosmopolitan and critical cosmopolitan projects lies in their respective position and perspectives: while traditional cosmopolitanism emerges from the center of colonial or neocolonial power, the proponents of critical cosmopolitanism(s) are located on the margins. For Mignolo, this group consists predominantly of (former) colonial subjects, but it could easily be expanded also to include African Americans and other members of the black diaspora. Their insider-outsider position within American and Western society, it seems, has historically provided them with exactly the kind of "border thinking" that Mignolo sees as essential for the development of a new breed of critical cosmopolitanism. (3) Unfortunately, Mignolo never really specifies how such border thinking might translate into individual cosmopolitan stances. Throughout his essay, his exploration of the term remains at the fairly abstract level of "border thinking," "coloniality," and "planetary conviviality." How these forces shape the critical cosmopolitanism of the individual is not much developed.

Ross Posnock, on the other hand, focuses on exactly this individual formation of critical cosmopolitanism in his comments on the philosophy of Richard Wright. Understanding the concept somewhat differently from Mignolo, he argues in Color and Culture that "Wright's critical cosmopolitanism and its interrogation of race belong to what has been called an 'eclipsed tradition in black intellectual culture'" (10). Posnock here links critical cosmopolitanism explicitly to African American intellectual history, and to the transnational space of the black Atlantic. Wright's contemporary critics, Posnock argues, made him "into the sacred totem of genuine blackness," and this "canonization ... left little or no room for the expatriated, proudly 'rootless' internationalist" that emerges from Wright's later nonfiction texts (10). (4) The "border-thinking" that is so central to Mignolo's understanding of critical cosmopolitanism is also implicit in Posnock's conceptualization of the term in the context of the black diaspora; however, he emphasizes much more than Mignolo does the individual formation of cosmopolitanism, seeing the destabilization of national and racial boundaries and the affirmation of a transracial human community as essential aspects of the concept.

This latter emphasis Posnock shares with Paul Gilroy, who does not speak of "critical" cosmopolitanism, but who also insists, in The Black Atlantic (1993) and elsewhere, on the social, ethical, and transracial dimensions of the concept. In Postcolonial Melancholia (2005), Gilroy expresses his regret about the fact that "today, any open stance toward otherness appears old-fashioned, new-agey, and quaintly ethnocentric" (4). Recent theoretical interventions, Gilroy explains, have made us "acutely aware of the limitations placed upon the twentieth century's cosmopolitan hopes by the inability to conceptualize multicultural and postcolonial relations as anything other than risk and jeopardy" (4). Gilroy has begun to argue for a "planetary humanism" rather than, explicitly, for cosmopolitanism; however, the call for a transcendence of thinking of both nation and race in the building of political solidarities is still present in his work, and the "easy refusal of cosmopolitan and humanistic desires," for him, continues to be "a failure of political imagination" (5). These three scholars--Mignolo, Posnock, and Gilroy--therefore all insist on a reconceptualization of (critical) cosmopolitanism that takes into consideration postcolonial and multicultural relations, valuing diverse and nonwhite, or non-Western, perspectives.

To these related but somewhat different uses of the concept, I want to add another one, as it appears in Gavin Kendall, Ian Woodward, and Zlatko Skrbis's The Sociology of Cosmopolitanism. In their discussion of individual cosmopolitanism, the three authors offer a much more inclusive definition of critical cosmopolitanism that does not insist on specifically marginalized or racialized subject positions. Defining three "fundamental types" of attitudinal and performative cosmopolitan engagement, Kendall, Woodward, and Skrbis list 1) the sampling style of cosmopolitanism, 2) the immersive style of cosmopolitanism, and 3) the reflexive style of cosmopolitanism. While the first type has only a superficial and often "temporary, fleeting connection" with cultural otherness, usually "on the terms of the user, frequently as a consumer" (115), the second "is a type of cultural engagement and exchange that is deeper, more strategic and desiring," actively seeking and enjoying immersion in foreign cultures (119). The third, finally, "shows a genuine commitment to living and thinking beyond the local or nation and is more likely to act in cosmopolitan ways that are ethically directed" (121; emphasis in original). This "reflexive" or critical type of cosmopolitanism is marked by "a broad willingness to step outside stable, privileged and established power categories of selfhood," and an increased "capacity ... for critique based upon a universal ethic which values international cooperation and integration over the perceived self-interests of national politics" (122).

While this third type of cosmopolitanism, with its reflexive and critical capacity is, according to Kendall, Woodward, and Skrbis, "the least frequently occurring type of cosmopolitanism" (123), I argue that it is the kind we can observe at work in The Stone Face. The cosmopolitanism that Simeon develops is critical and reflexive, in Kendall, Woodward, and Skrbis's terms, because Simeon does show "a genuine commitment to living and thinking beyond the local or nation," and at the end of the novel, does "act in cosmopolitan ways that are ethically directed" (121). The novel also underlines, however, the thesis of Kendall, Woodward, and Skrbis that cosmopolitanism does not develop in a vacuum, but is instead in part a "circumstantially induced tendency" (104), and that "cosmopolitan dispositions are always enacted or called for in particular spatio-temporal locations" (106-07) and specific societal contexts. The Stone Face's black American protagonist develops his cosmopolitan insights as a direct result of his differently marginalized positions in American and French society, which provide him with the kind of "border-thinking" that Mignolo privileges as the prime perspective for critical cosmopolitanism.

Confronted with the anticolonial struggle of the Algerians, however, Simeon not only stands in solidarity with this specific colonial group, but comes to embrace the transracial "basic unity of human life" that is also central to Wright's cosmopolitan ethics (Wright 109). (5) Simeon's experiences in the unfamiliar social space of Paris make him aware of the interconnections and continuities between the African American experience in particular and the colonial experience in general, and among different kinds of racial oppression that are decidedly "uncosmopolitan" (Kendall, et al. 9; emphasis in original). As a result, he chooses to commit himself to cosmopolitan (and cosmopolitical) solidarity with the decolonization movement, a solidarity that is not compromised by Simeon's simultaneous solidarity with the civil rights movement "at home." My disagreement with Gilroy is precisely here, as Simeon's critical cosmopolitanism grows out of his individual experiences in a concrete sociohistorical context; it happens to correlate closely with Smith's own experiences and insights, made as a marginalized transnational subject and as a member of the Black Atlantic.

As Gilroy has noted, the formation of Smith's cosmopolitan ethics can be traced back at least to his first novel, Last of the Conquerors (1948). Based on his experiences during 1946-47 as a clerk-typist with the 661st Truck Company in Berlin, Smith's highly autobiographical debut novel expresses his outrage at the rampant racism within the segregated U. S. occupation army, celebrating at the same time the apparent lack of antiblack racism in postwar Germany. A critical and commercial success in its time, Last of the Conquerors thus grounds its powerful assurance of transracial humanity in a vision of Germany as a kind of racial paradise where the protagonist's dark skin color does not stop him from having a white lover, and where he can walk into "any place without worrying about whether they serve colored" (Last 67; emphasis in original). As Maria Hohn has shown, the novel's representation of a racism-free Germany did not quite accurately reflect German reality. (6) However, for protagonist Hayes Dawkins--as for Smith himself and many other black GIs at the time--the experience of relative racial tolerance in postwar Germany provokes a significant and permanent reevaluation of his place in American society. While Dawkins's contact with the markedly different ideological context of Germany in Last of the Conquerors is mostly circumstantial and temporary--he is, after all, a drafted soldier-it nevertheless seems to provide him with what Kendall, Woodward, and Skrbis see as a possible outcome of the sampling style of cosmopolitanism--"a pathway to, or building-block of, deeper cosmopolitan attitudes" (119). Finding it "odd" that in the land of hate that is postwar Germany, Dawkins "should find this one all-important phase of democracy" (Last 44), he cannot help but come to a number of far-reaching conclusions about the supposed "naturalness" of American interracial relations.

This is why Gilroy understands Last of the Conquerors as Smith's first step toward considering "the consequences of race-thinking comparatively and transnationally" (Against 316). And while the two novels that Smith wrote next Anger at Innocence (1950) and South Street (1954)--also offer interesting insights with regard to cosmopolitan and uncosmopolitan race relations, Gilroy is right in pointing out that The Stone Face--Smith's fourth and final novel is the most interesting from the point of view of transracial cosmopolitanism. The novel was published in 1963, at the height of the African American civil rights struggle, and one year after Algerian independence. It was as much a response to these important political developments as it was the result of Smith's more-than-decade-long expatriation, and his now truly deliberate and immersive style of cosmopolitanism.

Smith left the United States permanently in 1951, three years after the publication of Last of the Conquerors. Like many other African American writers, he had followed Richard Wright, who had made his home in France in the late forties. (7) In Paris, Smith, a journalist by training, continued to write articles for the influential black periodical, the Pittsburgh Courier, and also soon took a job with the French news agency Agence France-Presse. He quickly joined the black American expatriate community centered around Wright, and became, as Michel Fabre puts it in From Harlem to Paris, "what he had chosen to be: a cosmopolitan, worldly minded ... and capable of adapting to diverse cultural milieus" (238). Fabre's emphasis on the fact that Smith was fluent in French, and "shared the French life-style to the point of marrying a Parisian and raising a family there" (238), underlines Smith's quickness in adapting to new cultural surroundings. Smith himself stresses just this in a letter to his mother in November 1951. "I don't feel like a stranger at all," he writes. "I feel at home in Paris" (Letter to Earle). And while this statement, made only a few months after his arrival in France, might entail a good deal of stubborn enthusiasm vis-a-vis a skeptical family member, there is no doubt that with time Smith did indeed manage to make the French capital his own, and that he practiced, from the very beginning of his expatriation, what Kendall, Woodward, and Skrbis call "the immersive style of cosmopolitanism" (119). (8) Nevertheless, his insider-outsider position in French society made it easy for him to keep a critical distance from his adopted home, and over the years his cosmopolitan disposition grew increasingly more reflexive. That same distance and reflexivity also inform the critical cosmopolitanism of The Stone Face.

The Stone Face is, to my knowledge, the only African American novelistic engagement of its time with the so-called "Algerian question" in France. (9) Written at roughly the same time as Richard Wright was working on the manuscript "Island of Hallucination," Smith dared to put at the center of his novel what Wright tried to avoid under all circumstances: an open critique of French policies and attitudes toward Algeria and Algerians on French soil. As such, The Stone Face, as Tyler Stovall has repeatedly emphasized, is important not least for historical reasons. In his "Preface to The Stone Face," a 2004 article in French and Francophone Studies, Stovall emphasizes that of all the texts describing the massacre of Algerians in Paris on October 17, 1961, "surely none is more unique" than Smith's novel, which "almost certainly represents the only literary account of the ... massacre written at the time of the actual events by one who witnessed them" (305). (10) Kristin Ross similarly asserts that Smith is one of the few fiction writers, white or black, who "kept a trace of the event alive during the thirty years when it had entered a 'black hole' of memory" (44). The massacre occurred when French police attacked an unarmed and peaceful demonstration of some 40,000 Algerians and sympathizers that had been organized by the FLN (Front de Liberation Nationale) in reaction to the decree of an indefinite nightly curfew for Algerians in Paris. It is unclear to this day exactly how many died at the hands of the police. After decades of silence, the French government finally acknowledged forty deaths in 1998; historians like Stovall estimate the number of victims at "over two hundred" ("Fire" 195). The realistic description of the massacre in The Stone Face, which can almost certainly be attributed to the fact that Smith was also a journalist and a great fan of Ernest Hemingway's simple and direct style, makes it an important document for historians and other scholars concerned with a long-repressed part of French colonial history. (11)

The historical relevance of Smith's novel does not end here, however. Stovall emphasizes that "The Stone Face ... is not only a blunt denunciation of French racism against Algerians, but also provides a penetrating exploration of the ways in which African American expatriates in Paris confronted this question" ("Fire" 193). Smith's story of the black American expatriate Simeon, who, comfortable in his Parisian exile, is confronted with the question of whether he should choose the side of the oppressor, or that of the oppressed. His dilemma lays bare the various and often self-centered reasons that led black American intellectuals such as Richard Wright, Ollie Harrington, and others, to stay silent about the abuses of another nonwhite ethnic group that they witnessed on a daily basis. The Algerian war, Stovall explains, "challenged cherished African American beliefs about French color-blindness," as the open violence of French authorities against Algerians both in Algeria and on French soil "call[ed] into question this cozy unity between African American expatriates and their French hosts" ("Fire" 183, 189). However, most black Americans in France chose to remain silent, knowing that open criticism of the French government would cost them their residence permits. Simeon Brown, Smith's alter ego in The Stone Face, is confronted with these realities and with the anxieties of his fellow expatriates; he must make his own choices in the face of them.

Simeon is perhaps the best example of Smith's general tendency to create sensitive, thoughtful, and intellectual heroes who are distinguished by the ambiguous privilege of being particularly insightful and at the same time, particularly tormented by their insights. Like so many fellow black expatriates, Simeon has escaped to Paris to find peace and safety. "Violence," he thinks, relieved upon his arrival in Paris, "would not be necessary, murder would not be necessary" (Stone Face 3). Simeon has left his hometown Philadelphia in order to prevent himself from one day running amok and killing the man who had stabbed him in the eye, or killing some other man who might try the same. Artistically, the young painter is at an impasse. He can paint only in a single motif: the face of the man who blinded one of his eyes, an "inhumanly cold face with dull, sadistic eyes, a thin mouth, tightly clamped jaw and deathly pale skin" (27). The man who presented him with this "stone face," Simeon is convinced, "felt no human emotion, no compassion, no generosity, no wonder, no love! The face was that of hatred: hatred and denial--of everything, of life itself" (27; emphasis in original). The stone face is, in short, the face of insensitivity, of indifference towards the Other. To be insensate, like stone, is to be pitiless and potentially dangerous; and it is also to be uncosmopolitan, since cosmopolitanism involves by definition the recognition of the other, and ideally also the respect for difference and care for each other (Turner 142). His own sensitivity, Simeon declares early on in the novel, "was a curse" (Stone Face 23) in the black Philadelphia ghetto in which he spent his childhood, as it is now as an adult, because the world as a whole is "violent and brutal" (25). At the same time, however, this same sensitivity--and the heightened vulnerability and understanding that come with it--proves central for his cosmopolitan development.

Apart from the haunting images of his past, Simeon seems indeed to have found in Paris exactly the kind of racism-free paradise that Hayes Dawkins and his fellow black GIs in Last of the Conquerors imagined--at least we are tempted to believe so at the novel's beginning. Simeon enjoys the liberties of his new life in Paris, as well as the friendships he makes within the black expatriate community, a fictional version of the historical African American community in Paris, which as Tyler Stovall notes, "was cosmopolitan not just in its internal makeup but also in its broader perspective," and in its close connection to African intellectuals ("Harlem-sur-Seine"). The biggest obstacle to a happy life in this cosmopolitan paradise, it seems initially, is Simeon's own conflicted emotions around the topic of racism.

In an early scene, Simeon sits on the terrace of the Cafe Toumon and enjoys his new quarters when "his eye [is] caught by the radiant face of a dark-haired young woman a few tables away from him" (Stone Face 5). He at first feels too self-conscious to approach "an unfamiliar woman, white to boot" (5), but eventually brings himself to ask if he can buy her a drink. The woman declines, without even looking at him, and Simeon is "mortified." Certain that everyone is staring, he goes back to his table, revolted by the woman's "Racism. It was omnipresent. It was here in Paris, too" (6; emphasis in original). He now detests the French girl, "with her mocking smile" (6). Just a few seconds after this quick indictment of both the girl and his new surroundings, however, Simeon has to learn that things are other than he had thought:

 Suddenly, the young woman's face lighted as she looked toward
the
 street.... A tall African, black as anthracite, walked smiling up to
 her. They embraced and kissed. The people on the terrace continued to
 talk, to sip their drinks, ignoring this scene as they had ignored
the
 scene with Simeon. (6) 

In a clever rhetorical move, Smith here introduces the topic of "omnipresent" racism, only to dismantle it in the next moment as the paranoid imagination of a man who is haunted by his American past. The woman is not declining Simeon's offer because he is black her boyfriend is blacker than he is. She is not interested because she is spoken for, irrespective of skin color or race, and Simeon is left dumbfounded by this clashing of the French ideological context with his own, American one. As Bernard Bell has noted, "avoiding intrusive editorial comments," Smith encourages "identification with the moral and political awakening of his central character by generally restricting the focus to his double-consciousness" (185). The reader is invited to see France through Simeon's eyes, and since Simeon's vision is impaired--both physically and metaphorically--such a perspective cannot be but limited and skewed. Consequently, it must be modified and adapted as the focus of observation changes. The apparent cosmopolitanism of the French capital, both Simeon and readers soon learn, is actually not pure or unproblematic; racism is far from absent in France. It is just different, targeted at a different group of people.

The novel provides hints of French racism towards the Algerian minority early on. At first, such eruptions of racist rhetoric or physical violence seem only incidental. Simeon glances at a newspaper whose headline reads: "MOSLEMS RIOT IN ALGIERS. FIFTY DEAD" (Stone Face 7), but does not give much thought to the headline. Not much later, he witnesses a French policeman brutally clubbing a man whose language he cannot understand, and "[t]his violent scene of matraquage," as Kristin Ross observes, "jars loose a flashback in Simeon who relives his own beating at the hands of police in Philadelphia, now so distant in time and space from a France where he is respectfully called 'vous' by the police [and] welcomed to elite clubs and restaurants" (46). Such incidences create for Simeon an eerie proximity between his own past experiences in the faraway United States and the present experiences of Algerians in France.

This uncomfortable proximity is not least the result of Simeon's heightened sensitivity, which makes it impossible for him to dissociate himself from the destiny of the Algerians, like other members of the African American expatriate community do. It is that same sensitivity that also lets him realize immediately that the three Algerians who call him a "white man" in front of the Cafe Odeon are right when they attribute to him the position of privilege and power associated with cultural "whiteness," regardless of his skin color. The shock and discomfort that Simeon experiences at the moment of recognition of an Other's--in this case an Algerian's--perspective, however, is precisely what allows him to see his own African American perspective as historical and contingent, not natural or necessary. It is the understanding that the Algerian minority in France is faced with a dominant Other that is just as hostile and insurmountably Other as the nonblack part of American society was/is for Simeon.

Once Simeon has made his first personal contact with Algerians he soon befriends one of them, Ahmed, and accepts an invitation to visit his home in the Goutte d'Or, the immigrant-populated "Drop of Gold" in the north of Paris. The shabby and overcrowded quarters that he finds there again trigger memories of the South Philadelphia ghetto for him. Not only does he learn that Algerians mostly cannot find housing in other, less-rundown parts of town, but he also experiences a police raid in which he has to show his papers to an armed French policeman. After recognizing that Simeon is "not an Arab" (94), the policeman wants to know what he is doing there. "Visiting a friend," is Simeon's answer, upon which the police officer looks at him suspiciously. "You work for the FLN?" (Stone Face 94, 95). Simeon answers in the negative and is chastised by the French officer: "You're a foreigner. I wouldn't advise you to get mixed up in our internal affairs.... You could be expelled from the country at the slightest suspicion. Understand?" (95). This advice was, of course, familiar to all American expatriates, but at this point in the novel Simeon is already too much involved with the Algerians, not least emotionally, to heed it.

This involvement is mostly a result of Simeon's increasingly close friendship with Ahmed, who tells him early on that he believes that he and Simeon are "similar in some way" (82). Despite their differences in nationality and ethnicity, Ahmed explains, they are connected through a shared sensitivity, and they are both "repelled by hatred and violence," even as they see themselves occasionally compelled to use force and brutality "when there is no other way" (82, 83). The emotional proximity and friendship that develops between the two men out of this shared sensitivity--and certainly also out of their shared or similar experiences--has a number of far-reaching consequences for Simeon. Not only does it change profoundly his view of France, Paris, and French attitudes towards the Other, but he also grows increasingly distant from other black Americans. "Identifying with the Algerians," observes Ross, "means for Simeon first breaking with his own milieu and its values. It means first disidentifying with his own social group, the black Americans in France" (46; emphasis in original). It is this displacement, Ross observes, "which allows him to see what the other black expatriates, in their clannishness, do not" (47). Disidentification and reorientation are thus important elements in Simeon's cosmopolitan development from a mostly "immersive," to a critical and reflexive style of cosmopolitanism. Kendall, Woodward, and Skrbis's point that the critical type of cosmopolitan ideally manifests a willingness to step beyond privileged, established power categories of selfhood relies on the assumption of free will and choice, and it is exactly this reliance on free will that has often been part of the critique of concepts of cosmopolitanism. However, while Smith does grant his main protagonist agency, The Stone Face also gives expression to his awareness of the fact that individuals are socially constructed and that their agency is thus circumscribed.

In one of the most intriguing moments of the novel, Simeon spontaneously decides to take Ahmed and three other Algerians to his favorite night club. The five men are greeted with icy silence by the assembled guests and waiters, and the atmosphere in the club becomes increasingly uncomfortable; most distressing for Simeon, however, are his own thoughts and emotions:

 For one horrible instant he found himself withdrawing
 from the
 Algerians--the pariahs, the untouchables! He, for the frightening
second,
 had rejected identification
 with them! Not me! Not me! Can't you
 see, I'm different
! the lowest part in him had cried. He looked
 down with shame. (Stone Face
 108; emphasis in original) 

Here, Smith powerfully demonstrates the role of social pressure in the creation of racism and social stigma. It is other people's alienating stares, and the fact that he becomes "a nigger again" to the eyes that stare (108), that make Simeon want to abandon the men who just a second ago were his best friends. Having lived for months as an accepted if foreign member of French society, Simeon now realizes not only how quickly these privileges can be lost again, but also how much he wants them. His sudden urge to reject identification with the Algerians is an urge to deny sensitivity and the first step in the direction of becoming an uncosmopolitan stone face himself.

After the initial moment of shock has passed, however, Simeon's critical self-reflection enables him to regain control over his fears. He realizes that he has "crossed the bridge," and now feels "at one with the Algerians" and "strangely free--the wheel had turned full circle" (109; emphasis in original). In this important moment of (re)identification, Simeon consciously chooses solidarity with his friends over the privilege of being a "white man." This, he believes to be the right and--in the terms I have chosen here--cosmopolitan thing to do. Critical cosmopolitanism, as Kendall, Woodward, and Skrbis note, tends to emerge, as in Simeon's case, "from bonds of solidaristic sentiments and the imagination," which is necessary to think oneself into the position of the Other (Kendall, et al. 152). That does not mean, however, that it is an easy thing to do. "[A]dopting a cosmopolitan posture," Kendall, Woodward, and Skrbis remind us, "takes both an intellectual effort and a solid grounding in the real world of social action" (35). As a result of his solidarity with his Algerian friends, Simeon has to give back his key to the private nightclub, to which he now, as a "nigger lover," can no longer belong. Like Smith himself, who was close to Algerians and publicly assumed a pro-Algerian position though that was potentially unsafe for his own status in France, Simeon now takes personal risks and accepts personal disadvantages and injuries to stand in solidarity with someone who used to be the Other.

Even as this is quite remarkable, one could still argue that Simeon's act of solidarity must not necessarily be truly cosmopolitan in kind, but simply the expression of a newly chosen kinship and identification with a particular ethnic group, or even a simple projection of his own experiences onto the Other. And indeed, Simeon's act of solidarity with the Algerians is only a first step in a much larger personal development. Another important factor in that development is his love relationship with the Polish woman Maria.

Maria is a Jewish concentration camp survivor who hopes to make a career as an actress in Paris. She presents herself as a lighthearted young woman, determined to leave the horror of the camp behind, but Simeon soon comes to understand that she is haunted by the same face that keeps troubling him. Like Simeon, Maria suffers from impaired vision as a result of the physical violence she has endured, and when she talks about the German camp commander who kept her and her family alive but also regularly raped the then-nine-year-old girl, we realize that she too is haunted by a stone face. Remembering the dreadful moments when the commander's "face would change," she reverts to Simeon's painting, because she "cannot describe it; it was terrible--yes, like the face in your portrait; his eyes would be hard, the blood would go away and his skin would be white like ashes, cold like stone" (Stone Face 76). The stone face here emerges as the abstract image of racial oppression, transcending the concrete historical situations and conditions of such oppression. However, this connection between Simeon's and Maria's fate, and the implied linking of Jewish and black histories of abuse, is only the beginning. Smith also uses the figure of Maria to make clear that "not even" the Algerians--who clearly allegorize the oppressed in the novel are without racism and discriminating attitudes toward others.

When Maria shows Simeon a new bracelet and feels she might have been overcharged by the shopkeeper, one of the Algerians blurts out: "Probably some dirty Jew sold it to you" (121). Simeon is "stunned" at this racist remark from one of his friends: "Abruptly a whole mental and psychological structure he had built up since the day he had first talked with Hossein seemed to collapse." Maria, for her part, reacts with icy anger: "I am dirty Jew," she tells Hossein, who feels terrible at the realization of his faux pas (122). After all, he cares for Mafia, and realizes only in the moment of her reaction that he has hurt her feelings with his thoughtlessly voiced prejudice. This important moment in The Stone Face, in which the oppressed proves just as susceptible to racial prejudice as the oppressor, not only shows Smith's capacity as a writer, but also gives evidence of his own critical cosmopolitanism. He uses his novel to voice a passionate critique of French and American racism, but resists romanticizing or idealizing the victims of that racism.

The vehicle of this critique in the novel remains Smith's alter ego Simeon, who after the incident in the nightclub becomes even more involved not only with Ahmed personally, but also with the Algerian liberation struggle as a political project. He has heated discussions with fellow expatriates about the question of whether they should get involved in the Algerian fight for independence, or whether the intensifying civil rights movement in the United States obligates black Americans to go back "home" to join the struggle. Simeon admits that he feels guilty about not being part of that important struggle, and wonders if he should go back; but others, like Babe Carter, who after years in Paris still insists that Algerians are inconsiderate "white people" (Stone Face 105), make clear that they, despite their feelings of guilt, will never go back: "I ain't goin back to the States," explains Babe, "The States don't say nothin' to me. I been away from all this racism so long that I wouldn't be able to adjust to (145). On the one hand, Babe voices Simeon's own fears, while on the other, insists on a kind of deliberate blindness toward French racism toward the Algerian minority that Simeon just cannot share. As a result, Simeon becomes increasingly bitter about "the foreigners," who live "in a fantasy world, like foam floating on the sea of French society" (175). After learning that Ahmed has joined the FLN, he keeps pondering the possibility of becoming more politically engaged, be that by returning to the United States, or by going to Algeria, or to sub-Saharan Africa.

It is in Paris, however, that he finally feels compelled to take action. Witnessing the massacre of Algerians on that fateful October day, Simeon cannot control himself when he sees a French policeman beating an Algerian woman and her baby on the streets of Paris. (12) Coming to the rescue of woman and child, he suddenly recognizes the policeman's face, "that face he knew so well, the face in America he had tried to escape" (Stone Face 203). It is the stone face that Simeon recognizes in front of him, another incarnation of the face of insensitivity and cruelty. It is in this moment that the last bit of the fantasy of a peaceful and cosmopolitan Paris collapses. Tormented by the pain in the socket of his missing eye, Simeon swings "his fist into that hated face, with all his strength" (203). The man who abhors nothing more than violence feels forced into violent action himself, in defense of the helpless woman and child as much as in desperate and helpless revenge for his own injuries.

After attacking the policeman, Simeon is arrested and shipped to a prison camp outside of Paris; there, surrounded by "literally thousands of Algerians," he comes to the realization that is the central thesis of the novel:

 The face of the French cop ... the face of the Nazi torturer at
Buchenwald
 and Dachau, the face of the hysterical mob at Little Rock, the face
of the
 Afrikaner bigot and the Portuguese butcher in Angola, and, yes, the
black
 faces of Lumumba's murderers--they were all the same face.
Wherever this
 face was found, it was his enemy; and whoever feared, or suffered
from or
 fought against this face was his brother. (Stone Face
 205-06) 

Simeon, who has understood that either being or defending the oppressed is the only way to avoid becoming an insensate stone face himself, here also realizes that being the object of oppression links him to every other oppressed being in the world. That realization puts him at the same time in opposition to the oppressor. As Bernard Bell notes, the main theme of The Stone Face is that "wherever oppression exists, it dehumanizes the oppressor as well as the victim; and anybody who lives in its shadow is guilty of social and moral blindness and irresponsibility" (184). Although Simeon's physical vision is still impaired, his emotional and intellectual insights have progressed significantly by the end of the novel. Cosmopolitans, he now understands, are faced with racial and social injustice everywhere they go, and their opponents can assume any nationality, race or skin color.

The Multiple Sites of Critical Cosmopolitanism

Paul Gilroy's reading of The Stone Face is especially sympathetic to the above-quoted passage, which Gilroy interprets as an expression of Smith's insight "that the face of racial hatred could be fought when and wherever it appeared" (Against 323), All the more regrettable, for Gilroy, is Smith's decision to send Simeon "back home" at the end of the novel to join the American civil rights struggle. This decision, in Gilroy's view, marks a sudden change from a complex to a simplistic narrative, since it "is neither illuminated nor justified and becomes an explicit if unconvincing repudiation of the cosmopolitan alternative involved in taking responsibility for the struggle against injustice in its immediate manifestations" (Against 323).

Gilroy's final verdict, I believe, does not do the novel justice for at least two reasons. One reason is that Simeon's conflicted feelings about the civil rights struggle in the United States have actually been a constant threat throughout the novel. It is no coincidence that his final realization about the universality of oppression mentions "the hysterical mob at Little Rock" (Stone Face 205). Earlier in the novel, we see Simeon's almost existential conflict as he thinks about Lulu Belle entering the schoolhouse in Little Rock: "The more he thought about the little girl with the upright head, the more disgusted he felt with himself. He was over here, comfortable in Pads, leaving the fighting to the little Lulu Belles!" (143-44; emphasis in original). Simeon's cosmopolitanism is not only marked by a critical stance toward his respective interlocutors and surroundings, but also by reflexivity: the ability to investigate his own values, beliefs, and practices. As he gets more critical of French politics and begins to see transracial and transnational connections between different but related kinds of oppression, he also becomes increasingly aware of the potential escapism involved in his own and others' political exile.

Members of the historical African American community in Pads, such as Smith himself, were quite aware of the potentially escapist quality of their exile. Stovall notes that James Baldwin, for example, "ultimately resolved the conflict between his love of France and his sensitivity to the Arab condition there by leaving Paris in 1957" ("Fire" 190). (13) Baldwin's decision to "return to America in order to participate in the civil rights movement represented a realization that his ability to fight for racial justice in France was limited, so he therefore went where he could in fact make a difference" (Stovall, "Fire" 190). The depiction of Simeon's personal struggle in The Stone Face, then, much more than Gilroy acknowledges, does "measure up to the best historical examples yielded by the actual black Atlantic itinerants" (324). Smith, who had perhaps an even more acute awareness of the Algerian minority than Baldwin, was similarly conflicted about his life in exile. In a letter to his sister Phyllis in 1964, he writes: "I sometimes feel guilty of living way over here--especially when I read of 'freedom marchers' and the like. Maybe I'll come back eventually. But, sincerely, I can't stand that country [the United States]--not racially but politically and culturally" (Letter to Ford). The fact that Smith had learned to care about others first within a local framework left him and many of his compatriots feeling guilty when he "abandoned" this initial group identification to commit himself to other causes.

In light of all this, Gilroy might well have sensed a tension in The Stone Face that stems from Smith's attempt to work out a real-life conflict within his novel. Such a tension, however, must not mean that Smith "was either unable or unprepared to follow the logic of his own [cosmopolitan] insight to its obvious conclusion" (Against 323), or that the ending of the novel must be read as a "capitulation to the demands of a narrow version of cultural kinship that Smith's universalizing argument appeared to have transcended" (323-24). In my view, Smith actually does "follow the logic of his own insight," only there is more than one conclusion to draw from this logic. One such conclusion might have been to have Simeon stay in Paris and fight the French government. Another might have been to have him go to Algeria--as he plans at one point in the novel or to join the anticolonial struggle elsewhere. As it turns out, this is exactly what Smith had originally in mind. From his correspondence with his publisher, we learn that Smith originally had written a different ending for the novel, one in which Simeon left for Africa instead of the United States. It was his editor at Farrar, Straus, and Company, who took up a remark in a letter of Smith's and suggested that the book might sell much better in the States if the hero went back to support the civil rights movement. (14) Smith agreed and made the change. Whether he did so for ideological or for materialistic reasons, we cannot know. But even with the published ending of the novel as it is, in which Simeon books passage to return to the U. S. and tears up his painting of the stone face because "the reality had penetrated" (Stone Face 213)--I see no final collapsing of Smith's or Simeon's cosmopolitanism. After all, the civil rights struggle in the United States is, in Gilroy's own definition, as much part of the black Atlantic as the decolonization movement in sub-Saharan Africa.

If anything, Simeon's solidarity with both the Algerian struggle and the civil rights movement constitutes an extension of the idea of the black Atlantic that also allows for the participation of the Arabic (post)colonial context, which makes it an even stronger affirmation of a transracial cosmopolitanism that transcends and transgresses parochial thinking of nation or race. This is why Mustafa Bayoumi calls The Stone Face "a brilliant novel," asserting that "this little-known novel is a triumph in transcultural empathy, a way of feeling one's connection in the world through a shared experience with another 'Other'" (21). And it is of central importance that this cosmopolitan connection is not only felt but also practiced in specific contexts. Critical and reflexive cosmopolitanism is only meaningful, insist Kendall, Woodward, and Skrbis, if it is "secured through local participation" (37). Where that cosmopolitan practice is enacted matters, if at all, only secondarily, as long as it is in accordance with the greater ethical commitment and a sense of belonging that is "based on multiple and overlapping levels" (Kendall, et al. 38). There is no sign at the end of The Stone Face that Simeon has come to abandon that commitment or multilayered belonging. As Gilroy notes, the novel in fact does explore "how the racism of the de-colonizing process connects with ... other racialized systems" (316), and it does so quite successfully, including in its ending.

Unlike his protagonist--and unlike James Baldwin--William Gardner Smith did not go back to the United States, but instead made the choice that Gilroy seems to find preferable. A year after the novel's publication, Smith left Paris and moved to Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana. There, he helped Shirley Graham Du Bois build Ghana Television, as well as the Ghana School for Journalism and the first African news service. As he writes in his unpublished "Through Dark Eyes," he went to Ghana because he "wanted to participate in what was going on in the world," instead of "rotting in Paris" (18-19). After the coup d'etat in 1966, Smith returned to Paris. In 1967 he briefly visited the United States in order to report on the "race riots" for Agence France-Presse. It was his first return to the U. S. in sixteen years, and he recorded the experience, together with his thoughts on Ghana and Paris, in his last book, the nonfiction Return to Black America (1970). Smith continued to live in Paris for the rest of his life and assumed there, as Michel Fabre puts it, "the role of black spokesman that Richard Wright had often played in the 1950s" (252). As special correspondent for Agence France-Presse, he also covered important events in the decolonization process, such as the nonaligned nations' conference in Belgrade, the Arab summit in Morocco, and the 1971 economic meeting in Peru. He died in 1974, aged forty-seven, in a suburb of Paris, without having ever returned to the United States again. How his migratory life as an actual black Atlantic itinerant helped produce his critical cosmopolitanism is perhaps best summed up in "Through Dark Eyes":

 It is fascinating to shift vantage points, change worlds, turn the
prism
 slowly before the eye. I was, once, an American, albeit a black
one....
 The outward trappings of my "Americanism" faded as the
years went by, but
 one thing did not change: the blackness of my skin. I was, in the
United
 States, a black man in a racist white society; in Europe,
particularly
 France, a black man in a less racist white society; and in Africa,
for the
 first time in my life, a black man in a black society. The
progression was
 psychologically stupifying [sic
]. (10-11) 

Smith here clearly associates his continual shifting of vantage points with his repeated dislocation. But he also maps his life across the Black Atlantic, stressing the important continuities between postcolonial and African American concerns.

The Stone Face is an attempt to express in the literary realm these continuities, as well as the possible negotiations of political and emotional commitment that develop a critical cosmopolitanism from the perspective of coloniality. The novel also illustrates that cosmopolitan attitudes must not necessarily grow out of cosmopolitan conditions, though they can also emerge from uncosmopolitan societies. In Smith's case, a farm belief in the universality, of the human experience and a dim hope that this might provide some common ground for cosmopolitan understanding and solidarity seem to have provided the ethical grounding for his cosmopolitan disposition and practice. In "The Negro Writer: Pitfalls and Compensation" (1950), published in Phylon when Smith was only twenty-three years old, he wrote that "the Negro writer of strength and courage stands firmly as a champion of the basic human issues--dignity, relative security, freedom and the end of savagery between one human being and another. And in this he is supported by the mass of human beings the world over" (303). With its championing of basic human issues across color lines, and with its emphasis on the intellectual and emotional work involved in the process, Smith's oeuvre is an excellent subject for scholars and students interested in both black and nonblack transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. This is particularly true for The Stone Face, a fact that will hopefully spur new consideration of this little-known and underestimated novel.

Works Cited

Bayoumi, Moustafa. "October 17, 1961." On the Edges of Development: Cultural Interventions. Eds. Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran, Priya A. Kurian and Debashish Munschi. London: Routledge, 2009. 13-21.

Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1987.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Gramercy Books, 1994.

Fabre, Michel. From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991.

Farrar, John. Letter to William Gardner Smith. 24 July 1963. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. records. Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

Ford, Nick Aaron. "The Fire Next Time?: A Critical Survey of Belles Lettres by and about Negroes Published in 1963." Phylon 25.2 (Summer 1964): 123-34.

Friedman, Joseph. "The Unvarying Visage of Hatred." New York Times Book Review (17 Nov. 1963): 53.

Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.

--. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.

--. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia UP, 2005.

Gruesser, John Cullen. Confluences: Postcolonialism, African American Literary Studies, and the Black Atlantic. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2005.

Hohn, Maria. GIs and Frauleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002.

Hodges, LeRoy. Portrait of an Expatriate: William Gardner Smith, Writer. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985.

Kendall, Gavin, Ian Woodward, and Zlatko Skrbis. The Sociology of Cosmopolitanism: Globalization, Identity, Culture and Government. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Mignolo, Walter "The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism." Public Culture 12.3 (Fall 2000): 721-45.

Posnock, Ross. Color and Culture." Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.

Robbins, Bruce. "Comparative Cosmopolitanisms." Cosmopolitics: Feeling and Thinking beyond the Nation. Eds. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998. 246-64.

Ross, Kristin. May '68 and Its Afterlives. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002.

Smith, William Gardner. Anger at Innocence. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950.

--. Last of the Conquerors. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948.

--. Letter to Edith Earle. 1 Nov. 1951.

--. Letter to Phyllis Ford. 1964.

--. Letter to Roger Straus. 11 July 1963. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. records. Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

--. "The Negro Writer: Pitfalls and Compensation." Phylon 11 (Fourth Quarter 1950): 297-303.

--. Return to Black America. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1970.

--. South Street. New York: Farrar, Straus, Young, 1954.

--. The Stone Face. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1963.

--. "Through Dark Eyes." N.d. Ts. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. records. Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

Stovall, Tyler. "The Fire this Time: Black American Expatriates and the Algerian War." Yale French Studies 98 (Fall 2000): 182-200.

--. "Harlem-Sur-Seine: Building an African American Diasporic Community in Paris." Stanford Electronic Humanities Review 5.2 (Spring 1997). Web. 15 Mar. 2009.

--."Preface to The Stone Face." French and Francophone Studies 8.3 (Summer 2004): 305-27.

Turner, Bryan. "Classical Sociology and Cosmopolitanism: a Critical Defense of the Social." British Journal of Sociology 57.1 (March 2006): 133-51.

Walkowitz, Rebecca. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia UP, 2006.

Wright, Richard. White Man Listen! Lectures in Europe, 1950-1956. 1957. New York: Harper Perennial, 1995.

Notes

(1.) Fabre writes that the novel "deserves close attention as one of the few works of fiction genuinely inspired by Afro-American expatriate experience" (245). Gilroy discusses two of Smith's novels in Against Race, stating that "with an exemplary bravery [Smith's novels] dare to approach complex and important questions that have a direct bearing upon the problems of identity, belonging, and nonraciological justice that concern us today" (308). And Stovall has repeatedly noted that The Stone Face has much to offer (history) students of race and colonialism in both France and America ("Preface" 3 I0).

(2.) As, for example, realistic cosmopolitanism/cosmopolitan realism (Beck), critical cosmopolitanism/ dialogical cosmopolitanism (Mignolo), rooted cosmopolitanism/cosmopolitan patriotism/partial cosmopolitanism (Appiah), actually existing cosmopolitanism (Robbins), radical cosmopolitanism/cosmopolitics (Cheah), post-identity cosmopolitanism (Posnock).

(3.) Mignolo's border-thinking seems somewhat related to the Du Boisian concept of "double consciousness": "this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity" (5). Interestingly, Walkowitz uses the notion of double consciousness in her discussion of critical cosmopolitanism in a number of nonblack modernist writers in Cosmopolitan Style (2006). All of the writers she discusses--Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Ishiguro, Rushdie, and Sebald--make use, she argues, of what she calls the "double consciousness" of unceasing self-reflection (2).

(4.) Posnock reminds us that in texts like White Man Listen (1957), Wright insisted that he would welcome the day when "those conditions of life that formerly defined what was 'Negro' have ceased to exist" (Wright 108), because it would entail an affirmation of "the oneness of man, of the basic unity of human life on this earth" (109).

(5.) For a detailed discussion of Richard Wright's cosmopolitan ethics, see Alexa Weik, "The Uses and Hazards of Expatriation: Richard Wright's Cosmopolitanism in Process," African American Review 41.3 (Fall 2007): 459-75.

(6.) Hohn offers a particularly lucid account of the German-American encounters in postwar Germany, and discusses Smith's novel in this context. For a discussion of Last of the Conquerors as a cosmopolitan text, see chapter four of Stephanie Brown, The Postwar African American Novel." Protest and Discontent, 1945-1950 (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2011).

(7.) On Richard Wright see in particular Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993) and Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt, 2001).

(8.) Kendall, et al. explain that the typical cosmopolitan "has the technical and intellectual resources or 'capital' to gain employment across national boundaries, and typically has an ability to traverse, consume, appreciate, and empathize with cultural symbols and practices that originate outside of their home culture" (25-26). Smith definitely did have these "technical and intellectual" resources.

(9.) On the history of the Algerian war and the Algerian question in France, see Charles-Robert Ageron, Modern Algeria: A History from 1830 to the Present, Michael Brett, trans. (London: Hurst, 1971); James D. Le Sueur, Uncivil War." Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2001); and Jim House and Neil McMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006).

(10.) Stovall had the seven-page section of The Stone Face that depicts the 1961 massacre of Algerians in Paris translated into French in 2004, and made both the excerpt of the original text and the translation part of his "Preface to The Stone Face" (2004).

(11.) Smith's biographer LeRoy Hodges mentions that the young Smith read and admired the literary craft of Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway (6). Contemporary reviewers were very excited about the literary quality of Smith's fourth and final novel. Ford asserted that "The Stone Face establishes Smith as a serious contender for a place in the first rank of contemporary writers," and went on to compare Smith with Ralph Ellison: "On the whole, this is the best (not the most sensational) novel by a Negro writer since Ellison's Invisible Man. The quality of the experiences, the ironic overtones, the power of expression, and the refusal to court popularity by vulgarity of language make the reading of it a rewarding experience" (123). Friedman even dared to read Smith as a worthy contemporary of nonblack writers. "Among the most worthy young writers, Negro or white," he writes, "count this one" (53).

(12.) A detailed description of the historical massacre and Smith's authentic account of it can be found in Stovall, "Preface."

(13.) Baldwin expresses his conflicted awareness of the Algerian problem in his short story "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon," Going to Meet the Man (1965; New York: Dell, 1988).

(14.) In the letter to Roger Straus, Smith mentions in a postscript that "if the Negro movement had reached this point before I wrote the book, "The Stone Face" would probably have had a different ending, with the hero returning to the States" (Letter to Straus). The implication of this is not that Smith maintained a sort of primary allegiance to the United States, but that he--like James Baldwin--wanted most of all to participate in a movement that stood a realistic chance of success. John Farrar's reply that "it would be enormously better for THE STONE FACE if you were to return Simeon to the United States" suggests the importance of financial concerns in the novel's new ending. Farrar continues, "We were able to call back the proofs, and if you do agree with us that this change should be made, if you can do it quickly, we do not need to postpone too much. We will, of course, fix the jacket also" (Letter to Smith).