In 1925, Contact Editions Press (founded in Paris by Robert McAlmon) published 500 copies of The Making of Americans—the 925-page novel that Stein had written between 1903 and 1911.  Celebrating the 100th anniversary of that event, this conference asks how Americans were made, unmade, and remade by a city whose cultural magnetism famously drew artists, musicians, dancers, and writers across the Atlantic, often for years.

If you had been in Paris in 1925 you could have purchased Stein’s novel at Shakespeare & Company, and you could have seen and heard the first performance of Josephine Baker’s Revue Négre; the Exposition internationale des arts decoratifs et industriels modernes that defined art deco; the premiere of films by Jean Epstein, René Clair, and Jean Renoir; and the first exhibition of surrealist painting at the Galerie Pierre.  You could have enjoyed the sonic and visual extravaganza of everyday life—the clubs, the fashion, the automobiles—that had displaced the exhaustion of the war years. 

Though Americans had traveled to Paris throughout the 19th century, it is Les Années Folles that have assumed mythic proportions.  However well known, the list of Americans who found their way to Paris, and often to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas at 27 rue de Fleurus, remains remarkable: Langston Hughes and Cole Porter, Man Ray and Jessie Fauset, Djuna Barnes and Kay Boyle, Aaron Copeland and Josephine Baker, Ezra Pound and Sylvia Beach, Berenice Abbott and Archibald Motley, Harry and Caresse Crosby .  . . which is to say not just Hemingway and Fitzgerald (who each published a pathbreaking book in 1925).  While the story of American life in Paris has been the topic of memoires and histories, novels and films, this conference asks its participants to travel less explored avenues and alleyways, tracing exchanges and events that changed Americans—”their own way of beginning, their own way of ending, their own way of working, their own way of having loving inside them,” in Stein’s words.

The conference also celebrates the opening of the University of Chicago’s new Paris Center as a hub for international scholarly exchange.  At the site, the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture will convene conferences, symposia, and workshops focused on the political, social, and cultural histories of the United States.

FRIDAY, May 16
1:30 – Bill Brown – University of Chicago
Introduction: Remaking Americans

2:00 – Babette Tischleder – University of Göttingen
Like a Duck to Water: Berenice Abbott’s Art and Photographic Vision

3:00 – Cécile Roudeau – Université Paris-Cité
“Paris Black,” 1925: When “la Révolution française” Meets La Revue Nègre (Anna Julia Cooper, Jesse R. Fauset, and Josephine Baker)

4:00 – Brad Evans – Rutgers University
Après, Avant: Edith Wharton’s 1920s

5:00 Jennifer Iverson – University of Chicago
Hearing 1925 Paris

SATURDAY, May 17
10:00 – Sabine Sielke – University of Bonn
Gertrude Stein, Memory, and the Memory of Gertrude Stein

11:00 – Chloé Thomas – Université Paris-Cité
“We are back in Paris”: the transatlantic, multilingual story of a late Stein piece

12:00 – Tina Post – University of Chicago
Anything Special: Black America, American Paris, and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand

1:00 – 2:00 LUNCH BREAK

2:00: Kenneth Warren – University of Chicago
Repetition and Making it New: The Making of Americans, The New Negro, and the Sociological Project of Modernism

3:00: Yasna Bozhkova – Université Paris Nanterre
“Gay Paree” or “Desolate City”: Claude McKay, Gwendolyn Bennett and the (Un)Making of Black Americans in Paris

4:00: Jonathan Flatley – University of Chicago
The Time to Make Queer People

5:00: Bill Brown – University of Chicago
Closing Remarks

5:15– 6:30 RECEPTION.