Mimicry and memory: William Wells Brown reads Le Guide de l’Étranger

This article explores William Wells Brown’s Parisian travelogue to examine how nineteenth-century Black American tourists experienced and interpreted the capital through the mediating form of the popular guidebook form known as le guide de l’étranger . Brown, guide in hand, positions himself within Parisian spaces and embarks on a complex hermeneutics that vacillates between his lived experiences, the guidebook’s representations, and his perspective as a fugitive slave. Reading Brown’s travelogue, Three Years in Europe; or, Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met , alongside popular guides, this study shows how Brown adopts guide-like narrative forms—reproducing facts, dimensions, and itineraries—to claim agency as an interpreter of Paris and to enact a “fugitive tourism” that both mimics and contests imperial narratives. By tracing his encounters with the city’s monuments and his insistence on bodily emplacement within the spaces of memory, the article argues that Brown transforms the media of tourism into an act of witnessing in the service of an abolitionist aesthetics.