On Lenox Avenue, just south of 125th Street and a few steps from James VanDerZee’s old darkroom in which he caught the dazzling glamour of a Black Manhattan at twilight, stood, and perhaps still stands in ruined form, the Lenox Lounge, a storied uptown nightspot famous for its zebra upholstery and players only – priced drinks, its checkered mosaics and its checkered history.

The club was already something of a living museum when I first came to know it. Vaulted and low-lit, the Lenox was a vivid palimpsest of Afro-America. One half expected Duke Ellington’s insomniac eyes to fix on you from across the bar as you listened to Ja Rule and Ashanti duet. Brothers rocked their logo-splashed Avirex and Fubu carapaces with impeccable custom suede Wallabees or unlaced Timbs. Gorgeous, ageless women decked in furs, hooped earrings, and plunging tops laughed with sly glee at the players always running their game. Ossie Davis bar-side baritones, distinguished and downhome, traded Melvin Van Peebles-like tales you could scarcely believe, yet were all true. Matter of fact, I’m damn near certain I saw Melvin storying there one night myself. But to tell you the truth, it’s been years, and a night at the Lenox Lounge never lent itself to clear recollection.

The opening last summer of a 40,000-square-foot Whole Foods directly across from the old Lenox Lounge felt like a chess move: white queen to black king. The new emporium, which comes with an Olive Garden, is the crown jewel of the redevelopment of the 125th Street corridor — a 2008 City Council rezoning plan that paved the way for what has been described as the “mallization” of Harlem’s main street, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. The street now boasts a Red Lobster, an Old Navy, and a Raymour & Flanigan outlet. But the M&G Soul Food Diner that had survived since 1968 is gone. Only its “vintage” sign still hangs over what is now a fashion boutique.

But laments about the loss of black Harlem are old hat. Already in 1925 James Weldon Johnson was prophesizing that “when colored people do leave Harlem … it will be because the land has become so valuable they can no longer afford to live on it.” By midcentury the neighborhood was already a symbol of loss and decay. As Lawrence Jackson observes in The Indignant Generation (2010), essays and novels about the ruin of Harlem became a genre unto itself. For Lutie Johnson, the heroine of Ann Petry’s 1946 novel The Street, Harlem’s tenements are a quagmire she is forced to flee in tragic and desperate circumstances. Ralph Ellison’s pessimistic essay, “Harlem Is Nowhere,” originally written in 1948 (but not published until 1964 in Harper’s), is about the activities of the Lafargue Psychiatric Clinic on 134th Street, at the time a pioneering mental-health facility. Musing on the wider condition of black Americans, Ellison is struck by how a sense of homelessness connects Lafargue’s patients to the ordinary man in the street. On the block he hears repeatedly, “man, I’m nowhere,” which he writes “expresses the feeling borne in upon many Negroes that they have no stable, recognized place in society.… One ‘is’ literally, but one is nowhere; one wanders in a ghetto maze, a ‘displaced person’ of American democracy.”

Revisiting this legacy in the new millennium, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’s stunning 2011 book Harlem Is Nowhere captured the decline of a legendary neighborhood that continues to radiate cultural energy through its archives, its scrapbooks, its folk heroes, and its block association battles. There’s a deep melancholy to her story of coming to know a place only to watch its residents pushed evermore to the edge; of attempting to find belonging in a neighborhood where a proud past looms over a community that is losing the battle to determine its own future.

For a long time, it was a melancholy I shared. Harlem seemed like an anchor of the imagination — impossible to let go. True it was never entirely (or originally) black. But its special character for over a century was the unique result of middle- and upper-class blacks, proud and fed up with racist redlining, banding together to buy real estate uptown. That action paved the way for countless others, generations who have called it home, and in the best and worst of times kept alive its spirit. For black artists and writers it has been nothing less than a literary mecca, a Paris with better music, warmer voices, and hot sauce.

But what if, in this generation, the hope we continued to place in that one neighborhood, like the hope that in 2008 we had placed in one man, was misallocated? What if, at this very moment, the seeds are being planted for another kind of revolution, for a global mecca whose birth pangs you might miss if your vision was focused too narrowly on the blocks north of Central Park?

Right after the neo-Nazi marches in Charlottesville last summer, I found myself on an A train heading uptown. Next to me, an old man pored over the images of chaos and hatred in the Daily News. Nearby, in a typical scene of contemporary courtship, a teenage couple shared earbuds, watching a music video on her iPhone. Both of them sang along with the chorus, stopping only to flirt with each other in Dominican Spanish and English. They were listening to one of the summer’s breakout hits, a song called “Unforgettable” by the Moroccan-born, Bronx-raised singer French Montana, featuring American rapper Swae Lee. In the video, the duo dance with kids from a local troupe in the shanty towns of Kampala, Uganda. For Montana, the location reflects a subtle choice (in an otherwise decidedly apolitical career) to showcase the African diaspora in his music, reminding his audience of his own identity. The video for his 2016 single “Lockjaw” does something similar. Featured rapper Kodak Black’s Haitian origins are evoked in scenes of street life in Port-au-Prince juxtaposed against images of the Haitian community in Broward County, Florida.

These videos chart a dizzying path from postcolony to American empire — from North Africa to the Caribbean to Florida and back to New York City. They capture how, sometime in the last decade, the felt presence of what cultural theorist Paul Gilroy called the “Black Atlantic” has shifted into high gear. This imaginative umbrella term for the communities and transoceanic linkages produced by the Atlantic slave trade can no longer be relegated to an academic concept; it has become a reality. You can hear it all around you. The Yale art historian Robert Farris Thompson, famous for his pathbreaking studies of artforms across the Afro-Atlantic, declared in 2011: “The big triumph [today] is that the airwaves of our planet belong to black people.”

In a sense, this is obvious. Stars like Beyoncé, Jay-Z, and Kanye West are global icons, tastemakers, and ambassadors for American blackness. But the American R&B that they represent has been creolized. The influence of the Barbadian singer Rihanna, for instance, has been decisive in mainstreaming the rhythms of the Caribbean in pop music. Justin Bieber is just one of a slew of white pop stars who have turned to dancehall in order to make hit records. The sonic contours of the Black Atlantic have become louder, more insistent than ever before.

One of the most striking examples of this has been the return of Afrobeats, mixing the Atlanta-based style of contemporary U.S. rap and R&B with primarily Ghanaian and Nigerian pop music, producing a hybrid sound that is poised to dramatically reshape the landscape of popular music in the coming years. It builds upon an already dense transatlantic feedback loop: the collage of Mississippi and Niger Delta blues made famous by the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, the interpretation of funk and soul for the Lagos dancefloor by Fela Kuti, and the pioneering jazz of voyagers like Randy Weston and the South African singer Sathima Bea Benjamin who, as Robin D.G. Kelley traces in Africa Speaks, America Answers (2012), captured the spirit of African nationhood and resistence to apartheid. Now a new wave of artists is poised to reiterate that call, carrying forward a vision of diaspora that is, on one hand, enabled by social media, smartphones, and streaming downloads, and on the other, threatened by a resurgent ethno-nationalism that is hostile to everything it stands for.

Did Paul Gilroy see all of this coming? His 1993 book The Black Atlantic argued for a major rethinking of black cultural geography and its relation to the modern world. Pushing back against the tendency of scholars of his generation to assert essentialist and often reductive nationalist claims about black identity, Gilroy theorized a new world mediated by the Atlantic littorals — one brought into being by the Triangular Slave Trade that tied Africa, South America, the Caribbean, North America, and the British Isles together. Black culture, he argued, is inherently heterogeneous and transnational and best understood through the concept of diaspora — a historical analogy borrowed from Jewish history — whose use he helped popularize in relation to people of African descent.

Gilroy was concerned primarily with the circulation of ideas, in particular the movement of utopian, dissident, and activist thought. The Black Atlantic correspondingly focuses on black intellectuals whose work traversed the continents, like Martin Delany, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Richard Wright. It also explores the occasions and paradoxes of cultural belonging in black music: the introduction of African-American spirituals to Europe by the Fisk University Jubilee Singers in the 1870s; Jimi Hendrix’s “gypsy” aesthetic against the backdrop of the Swinging London of the 1960s; and the importance of Marvin Gaye and Detroit’s Motown sound to Nelson Mandela and the ANC political prisoners on Robben Island.

The music of the black diaspora is a polyrhythmic matrix that includes rhythm ‘n’ blues, merengue, jazz, reggae, funk, disco, rhumba, soul, hip-hop, samba, reggaeton, baile funk, and dancehall. But from the vantage point of the early nineties, just before the explosion of global interconnection fostered by the internet, the consumption and exchange of this music — the ability of musicians to circulate their work instantaneously or to collaborate with major artists in other countries — was still limited.

Today it’s never been easier, and the Black Atlantic is thriving. Consider the literature of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole, Zadie Smith, Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, and Junot Díaz; or the lesser-known explosion of francophone writing from the Haitian-Canadian novelist Dany Laferrière, the Guadeloupian writer and scholar Maryse Condé, or the Djiboutian satirist Abdourahman Waberi. The surge of interest in transnational narratives ranges across the arts. Ryan Coogler’s recently released superhero film Black Panther has occasioned a popular outburst of Afrocentric pride unseen in Harlem since Marcus Garvey’s UNIA parades came down the block a century ago. Unsurprisingly, the diasporic communion in music is an even broader and more striking phenomenon; it is the live signal of this grand cultural transformation, the shockwave of Black Atlantic cultures reconnecting in our time.

What will the music of this new phase of the Black Atlantic sound like? One answer comes in the form of Nigerian superstar Wizkid. Citing Fela Kuti and Bob Marley as key inspirations, as well as the hip-hop of Snoop Dogg and Master P, Wizkid (Ayodeji Ibrahim Balogun) hails from Lagos, grew up in an interfaith household reflective of the national religious split (his mother is Christian and his father is Muslim), and quickly stood out for his ability to fuse the older Fela Afrobeat sound with contemporary rap, R&B, and reggae. His crossover into the American market began after Drake was introduced to his music by the UK grime artist Skepta. (This is itself an example of how London — with its overlapping generations of migrants from Africa and the Caribbean, as well as the abiding influence of black America — is a creative hub for the diaspora.) Wizkid’s mainstream appeal seems nothing less than assured — he’s rumored to appear on Beyoncé’s next album; he has recorded with Chris Brown and Drake; he’ll perform at Coachella in April; he started his own label, Starboy Entertainment; and he’s been an important patron of Nigeria’s booming fashion industry.

The new generation of Afrobeats is colored by the distinctive warble of Auto-Tune crooning, itself a legacy of the talk-box Zapp & Roger introduced into R&B in the 1980s before Daft Punk (in a classic Elvis move) repopularized it and made it a key signature of the hip-hop and R&B of the early noughts. In Wizkid’s music, this vocal style is married to distinctive rhythmic patterns inspired by percussion from across West Africa and the Sahel. The digitized vocals as well as a combination of Moog synth lines fill in the slick arrangements favored by contemporary producers. Atmospheric chords and relaxed tempos, closer to lovers’ rock than to disco, replace the jazzy horn and guitar licks of the Ghana “highlife” sound and the train-chugging funk riffs that characterized the classic Nigerian Afrobeat of the seventies.

You can hear all of this come together on Wizkid’s 2014 breakout hit, “Ojuelegba,” a track that celebrates the eponymous neighborhood in Lagos where he got his start in music, where the people, as he sings, “know my story.” Alternating between English and Yoruba, his lyrics like “My people suffer, they pray for blessings / for better living” evince the themes of every classic rap record: a celebration of hustling and striving to achieve success that would get one out of the hood, while simultaneously showing profound attachment to one’s rough-and-tumble origins. Ojuelegba is literally a crossroads in the city of Lagos, but it is also a metaphorically rich and suggestive site from which to think about the roots and potential reach of this music. The landing spot for most migrants coming to the city from across the African continent, its name joins together Eshu and Elegba, two of the most important spiritual figures in the Yoruban religion of Orisha. These complementary figures often appear as one, the god of trickery, with one foot in the spiritual world and one in the material (causing him to limp or move in a syncopated manner, to dance). Somewhat like Hermes, he is tasked with relaying messages, especially to people who find themselves at a crossroads.

“Ojuelegba” traces Wizkid’s trajectory from the studio where he got his start to his career as global pop star, and it speaks to a new generation of Africans who see in his journey their own aspirations. Africa is at a crossroads, and young people want to connect across borders, to enjoy a freedom that has for them long been undercut by conflict, neocolonial exploitation, and rampant corruption. The sense of pride is palpable, the message clear: it’s a new day.

The appeal of this music tracks real change on the ground. Where at one time there might have been room for only one pop star to represent the African and American continents (a role an artist like Akon played in the mid-2000s), there is now a thriving music scene with viable internal markets for streaming and touring. One important result is the emergence of black women as pop stars in their own right, like Tiwa Savage, sometimes touted as Nigeria’s Rihanna, or the phenomenally talented Yemi Alade, a cross between Missy Elliott and Janelle Monáe with her own unique Afropop sensibility. There is also hope for bridging the sometimes hostile divides between neighboring countries. One of the leading superstars of Afrobeats, Mr Eazi, born in Nigeria but schooled in Kumasi, Ghana, embodies this outreach (his breakout 2017 mixtape is entitled Life is Eazi Vol. 1: Accra to Lagos). African-American artists like the Wisconsin-born Jidenna are seizing on the moment as well, reaching across the Atlantic to catch the Afrobeats wave and boomerang it back.

The new accessibility of platforms for production and distribution (including drones for making high-quality music videos) means that musicians have more power both to share their music and to control their artistic vision. The image of modern Africa that Yemi Alade portrays in her videos is not entirely dissimilar from the Wakanda imagined in the alternative future of Marvel’s fantasy; the afro-modernity of Wizkid’s sets update the vibrant, modish aesthetic of Malick Sidibé’s 1960s studio portraits, giving them a similar retro-futurism. His sold-out stadium concerts in Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Cameroon, and South Africa, each carefully documented and shared on social media, demolish the perception of these countries as hopelessly backward “shitholes” from which people can only want to escape — instead refashioning them as places we might be lucky to reach.

Du Bois said that the twentieth century would be defined by “the problem of the color-line.” He foresaw the decline of empires in the West as an opportunity to rebalance power across the globe. Today Lothrop Stoddard’s old fear of “a rising tide of color” continues to hold sway, and the color line has resurfaced as the imperial fever dream of impregnable border security, drone sentinels, a Great Wall to keep out the dark hordes. The President of the United States’ derogatory remarks on Haiti and the lump-category of Africa (which also appears to include all of the Americas south of the Rio Grande), are typical in this respect. They illustrate the imaginary cordon sanitaire peddled by reactionaries who want to contain an emergent Black Atlantic identity bloc that their antagonism will likely only help to consolidate.

One of the ironies of the present is that, even as we continue to reel from this renewed ethno-nationalist sentiment in the United States and Europe, and neoliberal capitalism continues to hollow out our metropoles, the reach of black cultural capital is growing, reaching heights that would have dazzled even the most accomplished fellow travelers of the Harlem Renaissance.

Yet when Paul Gilroy revisited the question of the Black Atlantic in 2006, he sounded a distinctly pessimistic note. While observing that, “much of what now passes for U.S. culture worldwide, is in fact African American in either character or derivation,” Gilroy feared black expressive culture was losing its ability to resist cooptation. The pressures of neoliberalism upon the production of black music, he argued, were chaining it ever more tightly to the logic of material consumption, de-skilling its artistry and craft, and encouraging the glamorization of sexism, among other worrying trends. Looking around, he felt “an acute sense of being bereft of responsible troubadours,” figures like Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley who wove a note of rebellion and an ethical or spiritual message into their music.

Such debates about the political role of black music are vital and can continue without replacing protest, organizing, and voting. It would be delusional to imagine that resistance or even opposition can be martialed simply by enjoying a style of music, even if that music were produced by “responsible troubadours.” But we also know that culture can feed political mobilization. The Popular Front of the 1930s, as cultural historian Michael Denning has shown, was also the time of the Cultural Front. The Freedom Songs accompanied the Freedom Riders. Public Enemy has done more to popularize the spirit of Black Power among the hip-hop generation than what remains of the Black Panther Party.

As Plato once warned, “when modes of music change, those of the State always change with them.” Fela Kuti saw this insight as an opportunity. He saw a role for black music in nudging world historical change in the direction of decolonization, not just of the African continent, but of the minds of everyday people everywhere. In declaring that “music is the weapon of the future,” he meant not only that the creative seduction of music is preferable to the coercive destruction of guns, but that a new era was coming, one that would be characterized by fluid cultural exchange, where music would dissolve the old borders of blood, soil, and nation.

We are not going to win the battle over the gentrification of Harlem. The black mecca of the new millenium, if there is to be one, might well prove to be that city Du Bois rhapsodized in The Souls of Black Folk, “the City of a Hundred Hills, peering out from the shadow of the past into the promise of the future.” That city was Atlanta, where he hoped the flourishing of black universities and centers of learning would break the spell of crass American materialism and bring a renaissance to the South, a mighty cause that urgently needs and deserves our vigorous support today.

We will remember, and must remember, Harlem; but we will also have to begin to look forward and redraw our horizons. The days when James Baldwin might head uptown to Wilt Chamberlain’s nightspot, Smalls Paradise, to celebrate the appearance of a new novel, when the party went to the break of dawn at Baby Grand’s over by the bridge, when Charlie Parker jammed at Minton’s, and Billie Holiday, her gardenia perfuming the air, as Frank O’Hara remembered it, “whispered a song along the keyboard / to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing,” the glamorous age of Harlem when black folk decided to make it a showcase for the world — those days are not coming back.

The Renaissance Ballroom and Casino, which opened in 1923 on Seventh Avenue at 138th Street — the place that gave birth to the Lindy Hop, was homecourt for the all-black New York “Rens” basketball team in the 1920s, hosted political rallies and college dances memorialized by Langston Hughes, and gave its name to one of the most celebrated and iconic periods of American cultural history — was finally torn down in 2015 after several decades of vacancy and neglect. Despite desperate attempts by local activists (including the arrest of the Harlem historian Michael Henry Adams) to preserve the historic facade, it was sold to a real-estate developer that has turned it into an eight-story mixed-use condominium site they call “The Renny.”

It’s also true that kids play in Saint Nicholas Park now, even after dusk, without fear. There’s no shortage of drug dealing, but the worst of the heroin and crack-cocaine years has receded. As Darryl Pinckney put it, the sense that “Harlem was the place where you could do or get anything and get away with it,” is no longer the first assumption people make about the place. Hip-hop tours will take you up to 140th Street where you can see the mural dedicated to the rapper Big L, once one of the neighborhood’s most prized and influential artists (and an early mentor to Jay-Z), who was gunned down in a drive-by shooting in 1999. The comedian, SNL writer, and New York – native Michael Che recently joked that he grew up poor, but he now lives in “a wealthy white neighborhood: Harlem.”

But there’s also a lot more French being spoken on 116th Street, and it’s not by tourists from Paris but families from Dakar and Bamako and Yaoundé. The story of Harlem and its dream of a black internationalism is only turning a new chapter. The Lenox Lounge may be gone, but “the gift of black folk,” as Du Bois put it, has never been more potent. From Lagos to London, from Havana to East Atlanta, from the Gulf of Aden to the Gulf of Mexico: Harlem is everywhere.

The subject of the black family and its relationship to racial progress in America has never been neutral. Historians, social scientists and armchair critics from all quarters have led fractious debates defending or condemning it. These polemics all too often overshadow the very human experience they purport to understand, reducing to caricature full and entangled lives.

In her luminous and remarkably assured first novel, “A Kind of Freedom,” Margaret Wilkerson Sexton cuts through this haze to shine an unflinching but compassionate light on three generations of a black family in New Orleans who try to make the best choices they can in a world defined at every turn by constraint, peril and disappointment — a world in which, as one of her characters puts it, you quickly “learned the hard way that life could drag disgrace out of you.”

For a debut novelist to take up such charged material is daring; to succeed in lending free-standing life to her characters without yielding an inch to sentimentality — or its ugly twin, pathology — announces her as a writer of uncommon nerve and talent.

In “A Kind of Freedom,” Sexton pursues a family’s history in a downward spiral, with three alternating plot lines that echo one another along the way. The novel opens in 1944, with the budding love of Evelyn, a daughter of a well-to-do family (her mother is Creole, her father a black doctor who has raised himself to respectability), and Renard, a young man from a poor Twelfth Ward neighborhood who works menial jobs at a restaurant but aspires to study medicine. Their courtship, though ardent, reveals the strictures of a class- and color-riven society that suffocates ambition and distorts desire.

Forty years later, Evelyn’s daughter Jackie is a struggling single mother in 1980s New Orleans who is in love with her child’s father but afraid he will succumb to his crack addiction. Eventually, we get to know Jackie’s son, T.C., in 2010, a young man at a turning point in his life. Through T.C.’s eyes, Sexton portrays a post-Katrina New Orleans where the smell of mold still lingers and opportunities for fast cash in the streets abound, as do the chances of getting shot or arrested.

Sexton is a native of the Crescent City, and one of the pleasures of this novel is its feel for the particulars of local language, texture and taste: a jar of pickled pig lips, a family crawfish boil, the turn of an old Creole phrase, the sound of Lil Wayne on Q93 FM, as well as the shame of bringing a date to the movies when you had to sit in what was then (in more polite circles) referred to as “the Negro balcony.”

All this can bring to mind Jesmyn Ward’s “Salvage the Bones,” but where Ward is Faulknerian in her rhetorical sweep, Sexton maintains a cool, detached naturalism more reminiscent of Tayari Jones in “Leaving Atlanta.” Whether writing of black girlhood, the quotidian fears and hopes of mothering, or the lure of street life, she places her characters in the path of momentous choices while making it clear they have little to hope for. At the end of the day, it is mainly women like Jackie, “teetering between her narrow options,” who are left to pick up the pieces and wonder at their ability to cope. “What happened to the face of a broken woman?” Evelyn asks herself as she watches over her sleeping sister. “Did it turn to convey the loss or did it conspire with her heart to hide it?”

“A Kind of Freedom” attends to the marks left on a family where its links have been bruised and sometimes broken, but dwells on the endurance and not the damage. The force of this naturalistic vision is disquieting; it is also moving. One could say that it has the disenchanting optimism of the blues. Though her style differs sharply from Zora Neale Hurston’s sassy lyricism, Sexton looks upon her characters much as Janie views her life in “Their Eyes Were Watching God” — “like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone.”

Mathias Énard is not by any means a household name, but he is increasingly viewed in France as one of the country’s foremost novelists. Born in 1972 in the small southwestern town of Niort, Énard originally planned on studying art history and attended the prestigious École du Louvre in Paris. A nascent interest in Islamic art and literature led him to study Persian and then Arabic at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations, a change of course that sent him on a long series of travels across the Middle East before he eventually took up a position teaching Arabic at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

In 2003, Énard published his first novel, La Perfection du Tir (which one could translate as The Sniper Prepares). A tense and unsettling portrait of a gunman in an unnamed war-torn city that could be Beirut (but also, just as convincingly, Sarajevo), it reminded Énard’s French readers of the eurozone’s proximity to, and complicity in, the many ethnic and religious animosities roiling just beneath the surface of the ostensibly harmonious trade bloc piloted by Brussels. Since then, he has published four more novels and a handful of novellas, as well as translations of classic Persian and contemporary Arabic poetry.

Énard is best known for his sprawling, violent 2008 novel Zone. Written as one unbroken, amphetamine-addled sentence stretched across a canvas of some 500 pages, Zone rummages through the mind of its narrator, Francis Mirkovic, an intelligence agent with a past, who is traveling by train from Milan to Rome with a dossier he intends to deliver to the Vatican that catalogs evidence of war crimes committed throughout the 1990s in the Balkans. Ranging across the Mediterranean—the titular “zone”—Énard weaves geography and history together in a manner worthy of the French historian Fernand Braudel, and he does so while pitching the reader ever forward into a confessional of violence and alienation reminiscent of William Burroughs.

Presenting a nightmarish vision of post–Cold War Europe, Zone was unabashedly epic in scope and high-modernist in execution. Justly hailed by critics at home and abroad, it cemented Énard’s reputation as a novelist with major ambitions who was operating at the height of his powers.

After Zone, Énard did not let up. In 2010, he published a new novel, Rue des Voleurs, which moved his focus away from the northern ridge of the “zone” to its lower, southern half. (Rue was translated into English by Charlotte Mandell and published by Open Letters as Street of Thieves in 2014.) Following Lakhdar, a young Moroccan from Tangier, Street of Thieves continued to explore the portents of violence just beneath the surface and the different valences of cultural identity and belonging found on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar. As with so many of Énard’s characters, Lakhdar is a voracious and omnivorous reader. Language and the world of letters destabilize him and open him up to new horizons. In a statement that echoes Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” Lakhdar declares a credo that Énard himself might espouse: “I am what I have read, I am what I have seen, I have within me as much Arabic as Spanish and French, I have multiplied myself in these mirrors to the point of losing myself or constructing myself, a fragile image, an image in movement.”

This “image in movement,” a picture of the destructive and creative possibilities forged by the Mediterranean “zone,” is not just a literary device for Énard; it can be found in his personality and public persona. He has spent his own life moving from one end of the zone to the other, without entirely giving up the French language or his attachment to its literary traditions. His manner is soft-spoken and gentle, but he is also gregarious, gestural, and charismatic. One can easily picture him sitting at a café table in Algiers or even running a small Lebanese restaurant, as he in fact did for several years in Barcelona, the city that he now calls home and where he has written all of his books.

The image of Énard as a voyaging romantic is perhaps helped by the fact that he is physically striking, almost Dickensian in appearance: a man of diminutive and compact build, whose tangled curls and receding hairline frame a pair of unruly sideburns more reminiscent of Stendhal than a 21st-century writer taking on the challenges of a world enthralled by Google and ISIS. Énard can seem in his very person to be somehow seeking to contain and resolve the apparent contradictions, the dislocations of place, the fractures of culture and historical frames. Can one person, through the force of erudition and poetic sensibility, turn literature into a healing salve—one that we can all believe in? With humanitarian crises and terrorist mayhem delivering fresh horror in the daily news, the prospects appear daunting. Yet this is precisely the wager that Mathias Énard has taken up.

Énard’s new novel, Compass, just published in the United States in an English translation by Charlotte Mandell, came out in France at the height of a bloody and destabilizing year for the country. On January 7, 2015, gunmen affiliated with Al Qaeda in Yemen assassinated members of Charlie Hebdo’s editorial staff in the heart of Paris and later terrorized a kosher supermarket; then, in March, ISIS-inspired terrorists killed 21 people at the Bardo National Museum in Tunis.

In a gesture of solidarity and defiance of the terrorist threat, the jury for the 2015 Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, decided to announce that year’s finalists, which included Compass, at the Bardo museum. One week later, on November 3, it was officially announced that Énard had won. In France, literary prizes are still followed with the kind of media blitz and fanfare that normally accompany movie festivals. For Énard, there was little time to celebrate: Just 10 days later, France saw the worst bloodshed on its soil since the turmoil of the Algerian War, when a team of ISIS commandos sent from Syria detonated suicide vests, shot up café terraces, and massacred concertgoers they had taken hostage at the Bataclan theater. At the same time, the surge of refugees and migrants attempting to cross the sea into Europe reached catastrophic proportions, with hundreds drowning by the month.

This atmosphere of tension and spectacular cruelty directly informs the pages of Énard’s crepuscular narrative, which is set in the immediate present of 2014–15, with the Syrian conflict and the rise of the Islamic State as its backdrop. The plot of Compass is really more of a frame, an anchoring point for a series of loosely strung, impressionistic fugues that follow the streams of thought of one man over a single night. Our hero is Franz Ritter, a middling Franco-Austrian musicologist living in Vienna. Ritter suffers from a grave but unnamed illness, and with a good deal on his mind, he reflects on his unremarkable but well-traveled career as an academic. He also considers his fledgling love affair with Sarah, another unspecified member of the contemporary academy (her dissertation’s title is “Visions of the Other Between East and West”) who shares his passion for pursuing the obscure and forgotten translators, poets, and spies who—not unlike Franz and Sarah themselves—have, throughout history, gone flitting to and from the region’s old cities like Istanbul, Damascus, and Aleppo, cross-pollinating their cultural contacts along the way.

Chapters divide the night into bouts of insomniac reverie, as Franz fidgets and bumps about an apartment stuffed with books and mementos, piecing together for us the phases of his romantic pursuit of Sarah, while indulging in an uninterrupted cavalcade of soliloquies and scholarly sidebars, including several chapters from a hypothetical essay, “On the divers forms of lunacie [sic] in the Orient.” By dawn, Franz will have looked up old e-mails, consulted journal articles, listened to the radio, and compulsively refreshed his inbox far too often in the hopes of getting word from Sarah, who is conducting her research on the other side of the world.

Énard’s style is difficult to place, shifting through registers that shade romantic and even baroque, but are often tinged with ironic doses of self-mockery. This tonal play can be difficult to parse even in the French, and Charlotte Mandell is brilliant at finding solutions to bring these subtleties into English, though the overall effect is a kind of detachment and coolness less evident in the original. Énard’s subject matter, after all, is deeply erotic, and his prose in the French strives to intoxicate, to inundate the reader with particulars.

Of the four major cities that Franz and Sarah explore together, and that Franz recounts on his sleepless night in Vienna, the most intensely realized love scene takes place in Tehran. “The gliding automobiles, the smells of tar, rice and saffron that are the odor of Iran,” Franz tells us after describing their encounter, will be “forever associated, for me, with the salty, rainy taste of Sarah’s skin.”

While Énard limits the book’s frame to Franz’s recollections, he also occasionally moves outside them with Sebaldian insertions that feel more like hyperlinks, as Franz absentmindedly pulls up Sarah’s old articles from his hard drive and treats us to facsimiles of academic jargon, reproductions of postcards, and frontispieces to Goethe and Balzac. Presumably, the upshot for Énard in making his narrator an academic is that it’s a useful contrivance for dredging up the literary arcana and necessarily minor figures who populate his area of inquiry (we learn about the spy and explorer Alois Musil, cousin to the novelist Robert Musil, and the orientalist polymath Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall; we are also introduced to the Iranian writer Sadegh Hedayat and the Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab). These excurses in Énard’s field of expertise also allow the narration to oscillate between the first person and a more scholarly, invitational “we” that, one suspects, is supposed to include Énard and his readers.

But there is an obvious downside here as well. Even if one is willing to suspend one’s frustration at being made to feel ignorant, there’s the added unkindness of being stranded in a room with a pedant. Franz has an irrepressible fondness for the sound of his own voice. It’s insufferable to have to listen to a man prone to saying things like “life is a Mahler symphony, it never goes back, never retraces its steps”; it becomes intolerable once you realize this man is going to talk to himself all night, and it’s not yet one in the morning! True, Énard is mostly poking fun at the self-important gassiness of contemporary academia, and yes, everything suggests he is well aware that this is a wild fantasy of academic life bearing not the slightest resemblance to the real thing. But that still leaves it as an inside joke, and Franz Ritter, while occasionally droll, is not a sparkling wit.

One begins to get the sense that there’s another game at play, one that was perhaps not Énard’s intention when he set out to write Compass, but that a reader can’t resist surmising in the wake of its publication. Outwardly, Énard’s Franz Ritter has a lot in common with François, the hero of Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, which appeared early in 2015. Both men are undistinguished, middle-aged academics; both maintain a keen interest in unlocking the potential of the Orient. Both desire some kind of deliverance from women, something beyond sex but also resolutely and insistently related to it. In Houellebecq’s novel, women are emotional and sexual dead ends: François experiences his girlfriend as a source of indifference and sexual despair, and finds release in the company of sex workers; he also finds his mother’s death barely worth mentioning. Franz is just the opposite, in this and many other ways: Sarah is his passport to the world, to further knowledge, an almost ludicrously erotic vessel for what are primarily his own needs and realizations.

Both writers seem aware of the awkward limitations of this kind of female essentializing, but it doesn’t exactly deter either of them. And while Houellebecq’s François is far more repugnant, he is also a much more believable representative of the kind of reactionary mind-set that Énard is trying bravely—but, one feels, a bit abstractly—to refute. Houellebecq’s “depressive realism,” as the critic Ben Jeffery has called it, may be about as appealing as paint thinner, but it is also a solvent that quickly exposes all the hollow bits that come with Énard’s brand of idealism.

The contrast between the two writers is hard to overstate. Where Houellebecq’s prose is famously clinical and cunning, Énard’s tends toward inflation and mannerism, as though puffing itself up to handle a burdensome but heroic act of diplomacy. He writes passionately, with a boundless faith that the accumulated wisdom of centuries of learning, art, music, and philosophy on all sides of the Mediterranean zone will prevail over the desiccated vision of Islamists and ethno-nationalists of all stripes. In a 2016 interview with the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud, in an exchange about stereotypes of Islam in the media, Énard invoked the eighth-century poet Abû Nuwâs, a Walt Whitman–esque figure of the classical Arabic tradition, who celebrated “liberty, humor, drunkenness…. That, too, is in Islam today,” Énard insisted, “but it has to hide itself the most, so we see it the least.”

It’s the kind of statement that Houellebecq has no truck with, and he is hardly alone. For the French, the clash between the two writers reads like a Rorschach test for the left- and right-wing reactions to several decades of jihadist violence: half the country in thrall to the fantasy of throwing an undefined “immigrant” population out, and the other half, stunned and wounded by vicious acts of terror, still struggling to reverse the trend of half a century of failed integration.

Which side Énard is on is clear enough, but how his work might serve as a guide is less so. It’s not easy to find a solid plank for the reader to rest upon amid all the geographical and cultural disorientation in Compass. Believe it or not, tucked away in the pocket of Énard’s novel are not one but two compasses. The first is a replica of the compass that Beethoven is said to have carried around with him on his walks, which Franz has bought as a souvenir and left unattended on his bookshelf. The second is a symbolic one that he has come to appreciate from his travels in the Muslim world, and it points to the powerful geographic imaginary of Dar al-Islam:

in Muslim hotels they stick a little compass for you into the wood of the bed, or they draw a wind rose that can indeed serve to locate the Arabian peninsula, but also, if you’re so inclined, Rome, Vienna, or Moscow: you’re never lost in these lands. I even saw some prayer rugs with a little compass woven into them, carpets you immediately wanted to set flying, since they were so prepared for aerial navigation.

It’s an irresistible conceit, and one can see why it immediately appeals to Énard, who has built all of his books, like a latter-day Ibn Battuta, out of repeated circuits, voyages of circumambulation, with the purpose of knowing each time something more of the world and yet revealing to his readers what they have long not known.

But compasses are not the flexible devices that Énard depicts or perhaps wishes them to be: They may be open to interpretation, but they nonetheless reflect an unmoving geography. The impediments that ordinary people face when determining their own course in the face of rigidly prescribed doctrines are very real. Does knowing that our sense of orientation comes not from the East or the West, but from some kind of intermediate Mediterranean zone in which both interact, help to liberate us? Isn’t this cross-cultural inheritance as much to blame for our violent times as anything else? Can we shed our marks of identity (to borrow a phrase from the late Juan Goytisolo, another drifter in the zone) without fueling more hatred and confusion, the existential violence of alienation?

Cultural mutations are unpredictable and not always benign, after all, and they can sometimes create violent counterreactions. As Franz mulls over the strange case of the orientalists hired by the Austrians and Germans in 1914 to help incite jihad against England, he observes that even Islamic jihad is “another horrible thing constructed by both East and West…at first sight an idea that’s as foreign, external, exogenous as possible,” but that is in fact “a long and strange collective movement, the synthesis of an atrocious, cosmopolitan history.”

Énard hopes that his novel will offer an alternative kind of cosmopolitanism. Literature, he believes, can be something of a universal translator for the heart, recognizing how essential the discovery and exchange of beauty between people and cultures are to their mutual creation. But the poetry of his vision has its blind spots. And in France, across Europe, and farther afield, the blind spots of those of us for whom the wealth of the world is tangible in cheap airfare and study abroad and transnational business opportunities are being called out. Without some decisive change in social outlook and a reordering of the priorities of political economy, the contours of the present crisis will harden.

In Compass, Énard has created a giant fresco, a dream sequence parading the history of cosmopolitan Europe before us. But even as we crane our necks to stare in awe at his creation, it is hard not to notice the cracks in the ceiling, fissures that go right to the foundation and may bring the house down sooner than we think. Houellebecq, for his part, can and will find all his preconceptions and bile reconfirmed every time he turns on the news. His fiction perfectly captures the materially fluid and emotionally abrasive texture of modern life—its violence and sexism, the thinness of its cosmopolitanism and the callousness of its social relations—but he cannot get out of his own head.

Yet what’s remarkable is that both of these major novelists miss the story on their very doorstep, the human face waiting to be recognized. It’s astonishing, for instance, that in Énard’s novel Franz never once meets a Muslim character of any substance living downstairs on his street, operating the cell-phone shop on the corner, standing in line at the grocer’s, going to pray in a mosque tucked discreetly into a former gymnasium or community center. When he and Sarah go to Paris, they visit the tomb of a dead Muslim poet, but there’s no attempt to find the living ones, or to meet a few of the millions of people—many of them crowded into the projects on the far side of the city ramparts—whose lives and futures embody the tradition they are so obsessed with.

Houellebecq has never cared to pen a character that is not basically an alter ego. He complains a good deal about the people who surround him, but for all intents and purposes he has never met them in life, and he cannot bring himself to imagine them in his fiction. Indeed, with the exception of a few groundbreaking writers like Marie NDiaye and Abdellah Taïa, for the most part the novels that actually explore the lives of Muslims living in France have yet to be written.

One hopes that they will be soon, and that the best of Énard’s encyclopedic vision of a truly interwoven Mediterranean will eventually prevail. But I will confess for my part that, as I gaze warily at the events unfolding on both sides of the Atlantic, it is neither Franz Ritter nor Houellebecq’s misanthropic François who seems to capture the spirit of the times. Rather, we must look to Énard’s earlier creation, the haunted Francis Mirkovic, whose flight from the nightmare of history and all of Europe’s bloody fault lines is suspended at Zone’s close as he sits on a bench in the Roma Termini station. Énard ends the book with quiet words that offer no hope of redemption, just the fear of living on borrowed time. Time for a shared cigarette, Mirkovic tells us, “one last smoke before the end of the world.”

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In France, there is a distinct, almost literary pleasure in watching the unlikely rise of a handsome, ambitious young man from the provinces and charting his skillful navigation of the treacherous corridors of power, vanity, and ambition. But as Balzac and Stendhal knew well, the motif is also useful as a means of exposing the surprisingly shoddy scaffolding of government — the remarkable extent to which the majesty of state power, upon closer inspection, reveals itself to be a delicate facade masking ugly, unprincipled, and chaotic struggles for domination.

The triumph of Emmanuel Macron in the 2017 French presidential election is undoubtedly novelistic in this sense. At the tender age of 39, Macron is the youngest man ever to become the head of the French republic. Born in Amiens, historically the provincial capital of the northern region of Picardie, he grew up in a solidly bourgeois household. Both of his parents are doctors, and he attended Jesuit schools in the region before going to Paris to enter the Lycée Henri IV, one of the country’s most prestigious high schools. A precocious and gifted student, he evinced a passion and a flair for the dramatic arts — skills that have transferred well to his political role and influenced his personal life. In 2007, he married his theater teacher, Brigitte Trogneux, 24 years his elder and the daughter of a prominent family of chocolatiers known for their macaroons and their right-leaning politics. With a stellar résumé, he passed through the nation’s business and administrative grandes écoles, institutions that have become rites of passage for those seeking to enter the upper branches of state power. His trajectory, in short, has been that of an impeccable golden boy who is more acquainted with success than failure, who has enjoyed the fruits of being born into comfortable circumstances, and who possesses exquisite social-climbing skills and an unerring sense of good timing.

On the evening of his election victory, Macron strode out alone in a long, dark coat, under dramatic lighting, and into the main square in front of the Louvre. He faced I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid as loudspeakers played the official hymn of the European Union, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” It was a pointed musical choice, reflecting the view, at home and abroad, that Macron’s victory was a make-or-break moment for the European project, which has recently been imperiled by Brexit, the turmoil in Greece, and the contempt of the Trump administration. More subtly, local political observers also interpreted it as a nod to François Mitterrand and the 1981 election that brought the Socialist Party to power for the first time since World War II: The Louvre’s glass pyramid was one of Mitterrand’s iconic grand projects, and he also chose the “Ode to Joy” as the musical accompaniment for his victory lap.

Don’t expect Macron to lead a return to socialism, however. In fact, his rise to power, and the hope that it has understandably brought to a portion of the French people, actually embodies, and even magnifies, the extent to which the political foundations of the French republic are rotten. Macron’s story symbolizes, for many, not the potential to rise from lowly beginnings to the highest office in the land, but rather the entrenchment of social inequality that protects a culturally liberal, bourgeois class with anti-labor economic priorities. Macron represents a class of French citizens that has flourished under left- and right-wing governments alike, has refused to make any concessions to those who have been left out, and has become increasingly insulated from popular demands to end tax evasion by the wealthy, nepotism in government, and a eurozone monetary policy dictated from Berlin.

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In an address at the Library of Congress in 1964, Ralph Waldo Ellison mused upon his relationship with his father, who had bestowed on his son a somewhat curious literary forename. “Why,” Ellison wondered, “hadn’t he named me after a hero such as Jack Johnson…an educator like Booker T. Washington, or a great orator and abolitionist like Frederick Douglass?… Instead, he named me after someone called Ralph Waldo Emerson, and then, when I was three, he died.”

Ellison’s question connected the perennial anxieties that have haunted African-American artists for generations — questions of inheritance, tradition, and belonging — with a more personal and painful one about fatherhood: What was the meaning of a father’s legacy, in particular one who died early in one’s life? And what did it mean to be stamped by a name so intimately connected to his ideals?

Ellison’s experience was not every child’s. But the mark of sudden and premature loss, the haunting ambiguities created by an uncertain past, has constituted an overwhelming theme in African-­American literature. From the struggle over literary parentage between Richard Wright and James Baldwin, to the unclear family histories and patrimonial legacies in Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father and the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah’s In My Father’s House, to the letter from father to son in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, one can sketch out a veritable subgenre of literary work devoted to the struggle between black fathers and sons to give some kind of meaning to their shared fate and common past.

This fraught inheritance, the missed recognitions and ambiguities between family members, in particular fathers and sons, is one of the deep chords animating the life and writings of John Edgar Wideman, whose latest book, Writing to Save a Life, is perhaps his most desperate and bracing endeavor yet to “make some sense out of the American darkness that disconnects colored fathers from sons, a darkness in which sons and fathers lose track of one another.”

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Joshua Bennett is one of the most impressive emerging voices in poetry today. His debut collection, The Sobbing School, written in 2014 against the backdrop of a national crisis over state violence and black lives, won the 2015 National Poetry Series Award and is published this fall by Penguin — you can read three of his poems in the current issue of Dissent. Although he is making his debut in print, Bennett is already well known as an artist of the spoken word, whose performances have gained him a huge following on college campuses. He is also quietly building a reputation as one of the brightest intellectual and political thinkers of a new generation, and is currently a member of Harvard’s Society of Fellows.

I first met Joshua at Princeton in the fall of 2011. Over five years of graduate study together, he has been a vital friend and a source of constant intellectual inspiration. He is the kind of person who gets you excited about thinking and reading again. In the pages of Dissent last year I suggested that his voice is part of a literary movement in which poetry and politics are converging in new and unexpected ways, exemplified, for instance, by the success of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. This September we met at Dissent’s office in downtown New York City to talk about the origins of his book, affect in poetry and politics, and what solidarities and imaginaries might point us towards a more hopeful future.

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