This essay uses Edward Said’s theory of affiliation to consider the relationship between James Baldwin and contemporary artists Teju Cole and Glenn Ligon, both of whom explicitly engage with their predecessor’s writing in their own work. Specifically, Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village” (1953) serves a through-line for this discussion, as it is invoked in Cole’s essay “Black Body” and Ligon’s visual series, also titled Stranger in the Village. In juxtaposing these three artists, I argue that they express the dialectical energy of affiliation by articulating ongoing concerns of race relations in America while distinguishing themselves from Baldwin in terms of periodization, medium-specificity, and their broader relationship to Western art practice. In their adoption of Baldwin, Cole and Ligon also imagine a way beyond his historical anxieties and writing-based practice, even as they continue to reinscribe their own work with his arguments about the African-American experience. This essay is an intermedial study that reads fiction, nonfiction, language-based conceptual art and mixed media, as well as contemporary politics and social media in order consider the nuances of the African-American experience from the postwar period to our contemporary moment. Concerns about visuality/visibility in the public sphere, narrative voice, and self-representation, as well as access to cultural artifacts and aesthetic engagement, all emerge in my discussion of this constellation of artists. As a result, this essay identifies an emblematic, though not exclusive, strand of African-American intellectual thinking that has never before been brought together. It also demonstrates the ongoing relevance of Baldwin’s thinking for the contemporary political scene in this country.
{"title":"Strangers in the Village","authors":"Monika Gehlawat","doi":"10.7227/jbr.5.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7227/jbr.5.4","url":null,"abstract":"This essay uses Edward Said’s theory of affiliation to consider the\u0000 relationship between James Baldwin and contemporary artists Teju Cole and Glenn\u0000 Ligon, both of whom explicitly engage with their predecessor’s writing in\u0000 their own work. Specifically, Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the\u0000 Village” (1953) serves a through-line for this discussion, as it is\u0000 invoked in Cole’s essay “Black Body” and Ligon’s\u0000 visual series, also titled Stranger in the Village. In\u0000 juxtaposing these three artists, I argue that they express the dialectical\u0000 energy of affiliation by articulating ongoing concerns of race relations in\u0000 America while distinguishing themselves from Baldwin in terms of periodization,\u0000 medium-specificity, and their broader relationship to Western art practice. In\u0000 their adoption of Baldwin, Cole and Ligon also imagine a way beyond his\u0000 historical anxieties and writing-based practice, even as they continue to\u0000 reinscribe their own work with his arguments about the African-American\u0000 experience. This essay is an intermedial study that reads fiction, nonfiction,\u0000 language-based conceptual art and mixed media, as well as contemporary politics\u0000 and social media in order consider the nuances of the African-American\u0000 experience from the postwar period to our contemporary moment. Concerns about\u0000 visuality/visibility in the public sphere, narrative voice, and\u0000 self-representation, as well as access to cultural artifacts and aesthetic\u0000 engagement, all emerge in my discussion of this constellation of artists. As a\u0000 result, this essay identifies an emblematic, though not exclusive, strand of\u0000 African-American intellectual thinking that has never before been brought\u0000 together. It also demonstrates the ongoing relevance of Baldwin’s\u0000 thinking for the contemporary political scene in this country.","PeriodicalId":36467,"journal":{"name":"James Baldwin Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43951572","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}
Recounting a celebration at ASA 2018, reflecting on the twenty-year anniversary of the publication of the edited collection James Baldwin Now, celebrating the early success of this journal, and canvassing the renaissance in interest in James Baldwin, Dwight A. McBride introduces the fifth volume of James Baldwin Review.
{"title":"Celebrating Our Current “Baldwin Moment”","authors":"D. Mcbride","doi":"10.7227/JBR.5.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7227/JBR.5.1","url":null,"abstract":"Recounting a celebration at ASA 2018, reflecting on the twenty-year anniversary\u0000 of the publication of the edited collection James Baldwin Now,\u0000 celebrating the early success of this journal, and canvassing the renaissance in\u0000 interest in James Baldwin, Dwight A. McBride introduces the fifth volume of\u0000 James Baldwin Review.","PeriodicalId":36467,"journal":{"name":"James Baldwin Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47068354","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}
In this essay, Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. addresses the historical and contemporary failures of American democracy. Using the metaphor of “the magician’s serpent,” Glaude brings Walt Whitman’s views on democracy into the full light of America’s failure to resolve the problem of race. Glaude places Whitman’s Democratic Vistas (1871) in conversation with James Baldwin’s No Name in the Street (1972) in order to construct a different sort of reading practice that can both engage with Whitman’s views on democracy and reckon with what George Hutchinson calls Whitman’s “white imperialist self and ideology” as an indication of the limits of a certain radical democratic imagining.
小Eddie S.Glaude在这篇文章中谈到了美国民主的历史和当代失败。格劳德用“魔术师的蛇”的比喻，将沃尔特·惠特曼对民主的看法充分反映在美国未能解决种族问题的情况下。Glaude将惠特曼的《民主Vistas》（1871年）与詹姆斯·鲍德温的《No Name in the Street》（1972年）进行了对话，以构建一种不同的阅读实践，既能与惠特曼的民主观相结合，又能与乔治·哈钦森所说的惠特曼的“白人帝国主义自我和意识形态”相结合，以此表明某种激进民主的局限性想象。
{"title":"The Magician’s Serpent","authors":"E. Glaude","doi":"10.7227/jbr.5.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7227/jbr.5.2","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay, Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. addresses the historical and contemporary\u0000 failures of American democracy. Using the metaphor of “the\u0000 magician’s serpent,” Glaude brings Walt Whitman’s views on\u0000 democracy into the full light of America’s failure to resolve the problem\u0000 of race. Glaude places Whitman’s Democratic Vistas\u0000 (1871) in conversation with James Baldwin’s No Name in the\u0000 Street (1972) in order to construct a different sort of reading\u0000 practice that can both engage with Whitman’s views on democracy and\u0000 reckon with what George Hutchinson calls Whitman’s “white\u0000 imperialist self and ideology” as an indication of the limits of a\u0000 certain radical democratic imagining.","PeriodicalId":36467,"journal":{"name":"James Baldwin Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49642304","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 Barry Jenkins’s 2018 film adaptation of Baldwin’s novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, finding that Jenkins’s lush, painterly, and dreamlike visual style successfully translates Baldwin’s cadenced prose into cinematic language. But in interpreting the novel as the “perfect fusion” of the anger of Baldwin’s essays and the sensuality of his fiction, Jenkins overlooks the novel’s most significant aspect, its gender politics. Baldwin began working on If Beale Street Could Talk shortly after being interviewed by Black Arts poet Nikki Giovanni for the PBS television show, Soul!. Giovanni’s rejection of Baldwin’s claims that for black men to overcome the injuries of white supremacy they needed to fulfill the breadwinner role prompted him to rethink his understanding of African American manhood and deeply influenced his representation of the novel’s black male characters. The novel aims to disarticulate black masculinity from patriarchy. Jenkins’s misunderstanding of this aspect of the novel surfaces in his treatment of the character of Frank, who in the novel serves as an example of the destructiveness of patriarchal masculinity, and in his rewriting of the novel’s ending.
{"title":"Romancing Beale Street","authors":"R. J. Corber","doi":"10.7227/jbr.5.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7227/jbr.5.12","url":null,"abstract":"The author reviews Barry Jenkins’s 2018 film adaptation of\u0000 Baldwin’s novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, finding\u0000 that Jenkins’s lush, painterly, and dreamlike visual style successfully\u0000 translates Baldwin’s cadenced prose into cinematic language. But in\u0000 interpreting the novel as the “perfect fusion” of the anger of\u0000 Baldwin’s essays and the sensuality of his fiction, Jenkins overlooks the\u0000 novel’s most significant aspect, its gender politics. Baldwin began\u0000 working on If Beale Street Could Talk shortly after being\u0000 interviewed by Black Arts poet Nikki Giovanni for the PBS television show,\u0000 Soul!. Giovanni’s rejection of Baldwin’s\u0000 claims that for black men to overcome the injuries of white supremacy they\u0000 needed to fulfill the breadwinner role prompted him to rethink his understanding\u0000 of African American manhood and deeply influenced his representation of the\u0000 novel’s black male characters. The novel aims to disarticulate black\u0000 masculinity from patriarchy. Jenkins’s misunderstanding of this aspect of\u0000 the novel surfaces in his treatment of the character of Frank, who in the novel\u0000 serves as an example of the destructiveness of patriarchal masculinity, and in\u0000 his rewriting of the novel’s ending.","PeriodicalId":36467,"journal":{"name":"James Baldwin Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49321732","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}
I reflect on the place of If Beale Street Could Talk in the corpus of Baldwin’s writings, and its relationship to Barry Jenkins’s movie released at the beginning of 2019. I consider also what the arrival of the movie can tell us about how Baldwin is located in contemporary collective memories.
{"title":"A Star-Cross’d Nation","authors":"B. Schwarz","doi":"10.7227/jbr.5.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7227/jbr.5.13","url":null,"abstract":"I reflect on the place of If Beale Street Could Talk in the\u0000 corpus of Baldwin’s writings, and its relationship to Barry\u0000 Jenkins’s movie released at the beginning of 2019. I consider also what\u0000 the arrival of the movie can tell us about how Baldwin is located in\u0000 contemporary collective memories.","PeriodicalId":36467,"journal":{"name":"James Baldwin Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47660728","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 review article charts the general direction of scholarship in James Baldwin studies between the years 2015 and 2016, reflecting on important scholarly events and publications of the period and identifying notable trends in criticism. While these years witnessed a continuing interest in the relationship of Baldwin’s work to other authors and art forms as well as his transnational literary imagination, noted in previous scholarly reviews, three newly emergent trends are notable: an increased attention to Baldwin in journals primarily devoted to the study of literatures in English, a new wave of multidisciplinary studies of Baldwin, and a burgeoning archival turn in Baldwin criticism.
{"title":"Trends in James Baldwin Criticism, 2015–16","authors":"J. M. James","doi":"10.7227/jbr.5.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7227/jbr.5.10","url":null,"abstract":"This review article charts the general direction of scholarship in James Baldwin\u0000 studies between the years 2015 and 2016, reflecting on important scholarly\u0000 events and publications of the period and identifying notable trends in\u0000 criticism. While these years witnessed a continuing interest in the relationship\u0000 of Baldwin’s work to other authors and art forms as well as his\u0000 transnational literary imagination, noted in previous scholarly reviews, three\u0000 newly emergent trends are notable: an increased attention to Baldwin in journals\u0000 primarily devoted to the study of literatures in English, a new wave of\u0000 multidisciplinary studies of Baldwin, and a burgeoning archival turn in Baldwin\u0000 criticism.","PeriodicalId":36467,"journal":{"name":"James Baldwin Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44312144","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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