This review of Jubilee for Jimmy explores the various ways Baldwin’s genius impacts our musical, dance, and literary culture. It was an extravagant performance that had both thematic and chronological resonance, approximating Baldwin’s influence. Most creative was the dance sequence in which two men evoked dramatic moments of love and passion.
{"title":"Jubilee for Jimmy","authors":"Herb Boyd","doi":"10.7227/jbr.9.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7227/jbr.9.6","url":null,"abstract":"This review of Jubilee for Jimmy explores the various ways Baldwin’s genius impacts our musical, dance, and literary culture. It was an extravagant performance that had both thematic and chronological resonance, approximating Baldwin’s influence. Most creative was the dance sequence in which two men evoked dramatic moments of love and passion.","PeriodicalId":36467,"journal":{"name":"James Baldwin Review","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134885668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Music lives and breathes through the spaces of much of James Baldwin’s oeuvre. This article introduces a course that features Baldwin’s musical literature and teaches students to compose music inspired by their newfound knowledge of Baldwin. The course, entitled “James Baldwin’s Song,” was taught in the department of Africana Studies at Williams College in fall 2021. It guided students to listen to Baldwin in a different way—through a musical lens and by relating Baldwin’s wisdom to their own lives. This article takes readers behind the scenes as it shares some of the curricular choices that guided the course and student insights gleaned from it. Though students heard many things in Baldwin’s musical oeuvre, two ideas sang out most clearly: that the blues was not just music but was also a way of living, and that joy differed from happiness. Accordingly, the second half of this article illustrates these key concepts as featured in original songs from the professor and student co-authors.
{"title":"Composing Baldwin’s Joyful Song","authors":"Rashida K. Braggs, William Murray, Elijah Parks","doi":"10.7227/jbr.9.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7227/jbr.9.12","url":null,"abstract":"Music lives and breathes through the spaces of much of James Baldwin’s oeuvre. This article introduces a course that features Baldwin’s musical literature and teaches students to compose music inspired by their newfound knowledge of Baldwin. The course, entitled “James Baldwin’s Song,” was taught in the department of Africana Studies at Williams College in fall 2021. It guided students to listen to Baldwin in a different way—through a musical lens and by relating Baldwin’s wisdom to their own lives. This article takes readers behind the scenes as it shares some of the curricular choices that guided the course and student insights gleaned from it. Though students heard many things in Baldwin’s musical oeuvre, two ideas sang out most clearly: that the blues was not just music but was also a way of living, and that joy differed from happiness. Accordingly, the second half of this article illustrates these key concepts as featured in original songs from the professor and student co-authors.","PeriodicalId":36467,"journal":{"name":"James Baldwin Review","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134885666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Often overlooked by James Baldwin criticism or addressed according to its unique relationship to sex and gender, love plays a central role in the writer’s oeuvre. This article, conceived as a contrapuntal reading between A Dialogue (1972)—the transcript of a four-hour conversation between James Baldwin and poet Nikki Giovanni in November 1971—and If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), Baldwin’s fifth novel, will shed light on Baldwin’s “poethics” of love in the 1970s, after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and the author’s engagement with Black Power and feminism. This revision takes its cues from intersectionality and extends them via Hortense Spillers’s bold critique of Baldwin’s politics of intimacy, his writing style, and the American family grammar. His vision of love as moral “energy” not only anticipates what Denise Ferreira da Silva terms a “Black Feminist Poethics,” but is also a potential “key” to end “the racial nightmare” and “save the children,” thereby becoming a poethics of love for the infancy of the world.
{"title":"“Love Is the Key”","authors":"Emanuela Maltese","doi":"10.7227/jbr.9.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7227/jbr.9.5","url":null,"abstract":"Often overlooked by James Baldwin criticism or addressed according to its unique relationship to sex and gender, love plays a central role in the writer’s oeuvre. This article, conceived as a contrapuntal reading between A Dialogue (1972)—the transcript of a four-hour conversation between James Baldwin and poet Nikki Giovanni in November 1971—and If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), Baldwin’s fifth novel, will shed light on Baldwin’s “poethics” of love in the 1970s, after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and the author’s engagement with Black Power and feminism. This revision takes its cues from intersectionality and extends them via Hortense Spillers’s bold critique of Baldwin’s politics of intimacy, his writing style, and the American family grammar. His vision of love as moral “energy” not only anticipates what Denise Ferreira da Silva terms a “Black Feminist Poethics,” but is also a potential “key” to end “the racial nightmare” and “save the children,” thereby becoming a poethics of love for the infancy of the world.","PeriodicalId":36467,"journal":{"name":"James Baldwin Review","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134885663","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
1963 was a defining year in James Baldwin’s life as a public intellectual. Beginning in January with a trip to Jackson, Mississippi, and closing at a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee conference in Washington, DC, Baldwin often frequented the speaking rostrum. On October 7, he spoke at a Freedom Day event organized by SNCC’s Jim Forman in Selma, Alabama. That speech, recorded by a private citizen and heretofore unremarked upon, can be productively read as part of Baldwin’s ongoing radicalization, away from a solution that privileged rhetorical (re)invention and toward destructive and collective acts designed to subvert American capitalism. At another register, Baldwin’s speech functioned as an important culmination to an eight-month campaign to bring voting rights—and the federal government—to Dallas County, Alabama.
{"title":"“This Loaded Present”","authors":"Davis W. Houck","doi":"10.7227/jbr.9.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7227/jbr.9.2","url":null,"abstract":"1963 was a defining year in James Baldwin’s life as a public intellectual. Beginning in January with a trip to Jackson, Mississippi, and closing at a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee conference in Washington, DC, Baldwin often frequented the speaking rostrum. On October 7, he spoke at a Freedom Day event organized by SNCC’s Jim Forman in Selma, Alabama. That speech, recorded by a private citizen and heretofore unremarked upon, can be productively read as part of Baldwin’s ongoing radicalization, away from a solution that privileged rhetorical (re)invention and toward destructive and collective acts designed to subvert American capitalism. At another register, Baldwin’s speech functioned as an important culmination to an eight-month campaign to bring voting rights—and the federal government—to Dallas County, Alabama.","PeriodicalId":36467,"journal":{"name":"James Baldwin Review","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134885660","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The author reviews the recently released short film The Baldwin Archives (Laura Seay, 2022), and argues that, in restaging the most important moments of Baldwin’s 1963 interview for the BBC television program Bookstand , it helps us understand better Baldwin’s belief that people had a moral obligation “to deal with other people as though they were simply human beings.” Following the rise of the Black Power movement in the mid-1960s, this belief contributed to Baldwin’s marginalization by a younger generation of Black activists who identified it with a lack of militancy that they attributed to his gender and sexual nonconformity. But in focusing on the moments in the BBC interview where Baldwin elaborated his understanding of this obligation, The Baldwin Archives enables us to grasp its radicalism more fully.
作者回顾了最近上映的短片《鲍德温档案》(The Baldwin Archives, Laura Seay, 2022)，并认为，通过重现鲍德温1963年接受BBC电视节目《书摊》采访时最重要的时刻，它有助于我们更好地理解鲍德温的信念，即人们有道德义务“像对待人类一样对待他人”。随着20世纪60年代中期黑人权力运动的兴起，这种信念导致鲍德温被年轻一代的黑人活动家边缘化，他们认为鲍德温缺乏战斗性，并将其归因于他的性别和性取向不一致。但是，通过关注鲍德温在BBC采访中阐述他对这一义务的理解的时刻，《鲍德温档案》使我们能够更充分地把握它的激进性。
{"title":"“A Very Dangerous Effort”","authors":"Robert J. Corber","doi":"10.7227/jbr.9.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7227/jbr.9.7","url":null,"abstract":"The author reviews the recently released short film The Baldwin Archives (Laura Seay, 2022), and argues that, in restaging the most important moments of Baldwin’s 1963 interview for the BBC television program Bookstand , it helps us understand better Baldwin’s belief that people had a moral obligation “to deal with other people as though they were simply human beings.” Following the rise of the Black Power movement in the mid-1960s, this belief contributed to Baldwin’s marginalization by a younger generation of Black activists who identified it with a lack of militancy that they attributed to his gender and sexual nonconformity. But in focusing on the moments in the BBC interview where Baldwin elaborated his understanding of this obligation, The Baldwin Archives enables us to grasp its radicalism more fully.","PeriodicalId":36467,"journal":{"name":"James Baldwin Review","volume":"35 6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134885661","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Like much of his prose and nonfiction, Baldwin’s poetry follows his actual and figurative movement between Europe and America against the backdrop of his homeland’s constant refusal to work through its racist, imperialist, and heterosexist legacies. The 2014 reissue of his two poetry collections, Jimmy’s Blues (1983) and Gypsy (1989), as Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems urges us to revisit Baldwin’s poetry as an expression of his ideas and sentiments through a different lens: that of a blues poetics. In Baldwin’s poetry, the blues provide an aesthetic and epistemic framework for his expression of a radical internationalist politics of liberation.
{"title":"On the Fugitive Radicalism of Jimmy’s Blues","authors":"Marta Werbanowska","doi":"10.7227/jbr.9.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7227/jbr.9.3","url":null,"abstract":"Like much of his prose and nonfiction, Baldwin’s poetry follows his actual and figurative movement between Europe and America against the backdrop of his homeland’s constant refusal to work through its racist, imperialist, and heterosexist legacies. The 2014 reissue of his two poetry collections, Jimmy’s Blues (1983) and Gypsy (1989), as Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems urges us to revisit Baldwin’s poetry as an expression of his ideas and sentiments through a different lens: that of a blues poetics. In Baldwin’s poetry, the blues provide an aesthetic and epistemic framework for his expression of a radical internationalist politics of liberation.","PeriodicalId":36467,"journal":{"name":"James Baldwin Review","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134885662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article illustrates the multi-generational influence of Baldwin’s The Evidence of Things Not Seen on my path as a Black scholar and draws connections between representation, identity, kinship, and the interdependence of Black writers in the fight for social justice. Through tracing Baldwin’s working relationship with my father, former editor of Playboy magazine Walter Lowe Jr., I hope to illuminate the relational underpinnings of Baldwin’s work on the Atlanta child murders, thereby foregrounding the complexities of Black life. This article recognizes Baldwin’s work in Evidence as more than just a new-wave logistical, strategic, textual model of resistance but also as a mode of artistic production arising from a tradition that is deeply felt, collaborative, improvisational, and ancestrally rooted.
{"title":"The View from the Riverbank","authors":"Holly Lowe Jones","doi":"10.7227/jbr.9.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7227/jbr.9.8","url":null,"abstract":"This article illustrates the multi-generational influence of Baldwin’s The Evidence of Things Not Seen on my path as a Black scholar and draws connections between representation, identity, kinship, and the interdependence of Black writers in the fight for social justice. Through tracing Baldwin’s working relationship with my father, former editor of Playboy magazine Walter Lowe Jr., I hope to illuminate the relational underpinnings of Baldwin’s work on the Atlanta child murders, thereby foregrounding the complexities of Black life. This article recognizes Baldwin’s work in Evidence as more than just a new-wave logistical, strategic, textual model of resistance but also as a mode of artistic production arising from a tradition that is deeply felt, collaborative, improvisational, and ancestrally rooted.","PeriodicalId":36467,"journal":{"name":"James Baldwin Review","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134885669","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cecil Brown is nearing eighty years old and starting new projects all the time. He is currently writing a historical novel about the life of the enslaved poet George Moses Horton and a memoir about his friendship with James Baldwin. He met Baldwin early in his career, during a trip to Europe after the translation of his first novel, The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger (1969) [trans. La vie et les amours de Mr. Jiveass le Nègre , 1972]. They remained friends until Baldwin’s death in 1987. This interview collates several conversations about Baldwin that took place in December 2022 and January 2023. Brown reflects on their relationship, on Baldwin’s influence for him personally, and on the meaning of Black cultural celebrity more broadly; he also touches on Baldwin’s situation between Black Power and Black feminism, and the ramifications of the politics of the 1970s for the present.
{"title":"“You Know What’s Cool about James Baldwin, Man?”","authors":"Matt Sandler","doi":"10.7227/jbr.9.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7227/jbr.9.11","url":null,"abstract":"Cecil Brown is nearing eighty years old and starting new projects all the time. He is currently writing a historical novel about the life of the enslaved poet George Moses Horton and a memoir about his friendship with James Baldwin. He met Baldwin early in his career, during a trip to Europe after the translation of his first novel, The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger (1969) [trans. La vie et les amours de Mr. Jiveass le Nègre , 1972]. They remained friends until Baldwin’s death in 1987. This interview collates several conversations about Baldwin that took place in December 2022 and January 2023. Brown reflects on their relationship, on Baldwin’s influence for him personally, and on the meaning of Black cultural celebrity more broadly; he also touches on Baldwin’s situation between Black Power and Black feminism, and the ramifications of the politics of the 1970s for the present.","PeriodicalId":36467,"journal":{"name":"James Baldwin Review","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134885659","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
By situating Baldwin’s Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems in conversation with Jericho Brown’s 2019 poetry collection The Tradition , this article examines the theory of love in their poetic thinking. It argues that in their poetry, love emerges as a multifaceted mode of knowing and feeling, grounded in corporeal intensity and imbued with sociopolitical and historical meanings. Both Baldwin and Brown view love as integral to the understanding of queer sexuality and racial politics, foregrounding at the same time the challenges of loving and being loved in a historically anti-Black society. Their poetics of love coalesces the intellectual and the affective, the erotic and the political, moving beyond the conventions of inward-bound and personal lyric toward what Martinican philosopher and novelist Édouard Glissant termed a “poetics of relation.” Such transgenerational reading also allows us to explore Baldwin’s and Brown’s poetry as acutely attuned to historical moments which seem strikingly similar: Reagan’s and Trump’s presidencies.
{"title":"The Architecture of Love in the Poetic Thinking of James Baldwin and Jericho Brown","authors":"Joanna Mąkowska","doi":"10.7227/jbr.9.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7227/jbr.9.4","url":null,"abstract":"By situating Baldwin’s Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems in conversation with Jericho Brown’s 2019 poetry collection The Tradition , this article examines the theory of love in their poetic thinking. It argues that in their poetry, love emerges as a multifaceted mode of knowing and feeling, grounded in corporeal intensity and imbued with sociopolitical and historical meanings. Both Baldwin and Brown view love as integral to the understanding of queer sexuality and racial politics, foregrounding at the same time the challenges of loving and being loved in a historically anti-Black society. Their poetics of love coalesces the intellectual and the affective, the erotic and the political, moving beyond the conventions of inward-bound and personal lyric toward what Martinican philosopher and novelist Édouard Glissant termed a “poetics of relation.” Such transgenerational reading also allows us to explore Baldwin’s and Brown’s poetry as acutely attuned to historical moments which seem strikingly similar: Reagan’s and Trump’s presidencies.","PeriodicalId":36467,"journal":{"name":"James Baldwin Review","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134885667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Justin A. Joyce introduces the ninth volume of James Baldwin Review with a discussion of I Heard It Through the Grapevine (1982), “The Uses of the Blues” (1964), Florida, and Fox News.
{"title":"Same Old Piano, Playing the Blues","authors":"Justin A. Joyce","doi":"10.7227/jbr.9.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7227/jbr.9.1","url":null,"abstract":"Justin A. Joyce introduces the ninth volume of James Baldwin Review with a discussion of I Heard It Through the Grapevine (1982), “The Uses of the Blues” (1964), Florida, and Fox News.","PeriodicalId":36467,"journal":{"name":"James Baldwin Review","volume":"80 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134885670","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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