“A Man Among Men” in Algerian Paris: Modeling Motivation and Movement in Jake Lamar’s Rendezvous Eighteenth

Thesis

In this chapter, I map Lamar’s Rendezvous Eighteenth for Lamar’s portrayal of “Algerian Paris in North Paris. I bring together as a theoretical framework Toni Morrison’s use of the third person point of view, Laila Amine’s analysis of interracial romance and homosocial bonding in African-American expatriate fiction, and Tricia Danielle Keaton’s critique of Black American migration narratives of inclusion. I adopt Morrison’s approach to point of view to show how the narrator in Lamar’s Rendezvous Eighteenth functions as a guide. This guide function is central to how I situate the romance narrative in the novel. I demonstrate that Ricky’s decisions are motivated by love so much so that the love story is an alternate route of reading the novel other than detective fiction. From this premise, I expand Laila Amine’s argument about African-American expatriate fiction. She explains that in mid-twentieth century African-American expatriate fiction the African-American male protagonist expresses his manhood through an interracial romance on the Left Bank of Paris, and this romantic relationship is then challenged by his support of or allegiance to Algerian brothers in North Paris. I show that Lamar’s Rendezvous Eighteenth obfuscates this bifurcation of interracial romance and Algerian allegiance in Paris. I argue that Lamar uses spaces of romance and “Algerian Paris” to disrupt what Keaton terms “Black American migration narratives of inclusion,” which are generalizing narratives of “black” acceptance in France; instead, Lamar complicates notions of race, culture, nationality and place in Paris. I then use Scalar to model my framework and analysis of the novel. Scalar’s structure complements and enhances this chapter.

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