WHEN James Baldwin arrived in Paris in 1948, at the age of 24, he was a little-known writer with $40 in his pocket. When Ta-Nehisi Coates arrived there last fall, at the age of 40, he was the author of a huge best seller, "Between the World and Me," which won comparisons to Baldwin and upended his plan for a quiet, exploratory year abroad.
"As a writer, I was prepared for failure but not for success," Mr. Coates said of the frenzy around the book, which brought him back to the United States more than once during the year. "I definitely experienced the city, but I wish I had been able to get lost a bit more."
Mr. Coates is now back home in New York. But next week he'll return to Paris, in a sense, as curator of the third annual Festival Albertine, a free New York celebration of French and American culture. Running Wednesday through Nov. 6, the festival is organized by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the Albertine bookshop in Manhattan.
This year's installment, which will be streamed live online, brings well-known figures like the television creator David Simon, the poet Claudia Rankine, the painter Kehinde Wiley and the choreographer Benjamin Millepied, together with less familiar French counterparts to discuss issues of race, identity, citizenship and belonging.
"France is going through its own process of thinking about what it means to be French, about who is French," Mr. Coates said. "It's a moment where these two countries are really looking at similar things." These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
"Between the World and Me" came out in French while you were there. How was the reception there different from its reception in the United States?
I didn't want to hustle anybody and pose as this big-time intellectual, which is something I'm uncomfortable with, even here. But the book became an organizing place for talking about their own issues, and I was happy to allow for that. Americans are always saying, "We need to have a national conversation about race!" But we have no idea — France doesn't even acknowledge race.
The festival's brochure cites as a jumping-off point a passage from Baldwin's book "No Name in the Street," in which he draws a comparison between himself and Algerians he met in Paris, who "spoke French and had been, in a sense, produced by France" and yet "were not at home in Paris, no more at home than I." How did you build the festival up from that idea?
I got a lot of help, but thematically it was me. Given the influence of Baldwin on my work, given this being the year of Donald Trump, coming off the first black president, and Baldwin having a renaissance, I wanted to reach back and use him as a framing device. This is an arts festival, so then we went through all the different art forms and figured out how they would fit in.
There are panels on film, art, dance, literature and popular culture, as well as politics. Is there one you're particularly excited about?
I'm maybe most excited about the dance panel, with Benjamin Millepied. I really don't know anything about ballet. I do know about the flak that he got at the Paris Ballet, and that there's debate around race in ballet, but I don't know anything about the history. With the exception of two panels I'm moderating, I chose things I'm not an expert on. I just asked myself, what would I like to know?
Are many of the speakers people you met in Paris?
In Paris I was lucky enough to sit a few times with Nacira Guénif-Souilamas [a sociologist who has written about structural racism and Islamophobia in France]. She's a dual citizen of both France and Algeria, and just listening to her talk about that experience showed me why it was dangerous to make a one-on-one comparison between black folks there and black folks here. Her experience sounded a lot more similar to African-Americans, with the Algerian war being a rupture, in the same way the Civil War was a rupture. Maboula Soumahoro [a scholar who has tried to establish an offshoot of Black History Month in France] is someone else who is going to be really brilliant. When I came to these people, I felt like a 5-year-old, with all my dumb and silly questions.
You're moderating the opening panel, "When Will France Have Its Barack Obama?," which features Jelani Cobb from The New Yorker, along with three French scholars, including Pap Ndiaye, the author of "La Condition Noire" and a founder of black studies in France. What's your answer to that question?
I'm going to let the folks on the panel talk. But I'd say that Barack Obama, to an extent that is not fully understood, is really a product of black institutions. It's not like he ran from Hawaii. He went to the South Side of Chicago, which has a long, long political tradition. There was a community to root himself in. How does that happen in France? There you had the lack of a trenchant Jim Crow system, the lack of slavery on the mainland. The things that made racism so severe here actually gave black institutions much of their vigor. And there is a strong sense of community held together by those institutions. I could be dead wrong about this, but it would be tough to look for a Harlem in Paris. There are black neighborhoods, don't get me wrong. But that's not all Harlem is.
The Albertine bookstore, which is co-organizing the festival, is sort of like a gorgeous dream version of a French bookshop. Did you have a favorite bookstore in Paris?
It's horrible to say, but my favorite was the English-language bookstore Shakespeare & Company. They have a really quiet reading room where you can just sit and look at the river. People always asked me if I got in touch with my inner Baldwin. I didn't feel too much of that, but in that room I felt deeply connected.
Did you follow the Baldwin trail when you were there?
I really didn't. I love his work, but I don't want to fetishize him. I avoided Les Deux Magots. The last thing I wanted to do was look like some poseur.
You've been back for a few months. How did your year in Paris change your view of America?
We get into this very simplistic analysis of which country is more racist. But it's more productive to look at the history of a country. Racism certainly exists in France, but it's not the same. Is it better? I don't know. But I like it here [in the United States]. It feels like home.
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