City of Light

Paul Kessey, age twenty-nine, is caught between two worlds. Although his is a privileged world of successful blacks in Chicago, and he is a graduate of Princeton, handsome and well-connected, Kessey is uncertain how to identify himself in relation to the African diaspora, partly because of his light skin. Throughout a Paris sojourn, he is both attracted and repelled by different ideas, attitudes, and concepts regarding the place of blacks in a white society; he goes back and forth among the persons and the ideas they represent, and thus among contradictory possibilities of life as a black man. By intertwining in an intricate web racial, class, and political issues with the intense struggles of one man's heart, Colter presents a vivid portrait of the personal effects of prejudice and its hypocrisies. City of Light remains a daring push against the grain of American literary fashion.