james baldwin argumentative essay

July 29, 1979 If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is? By JAMES BALDWIN t. Paul de Vence, France--The argument concerning the use, or the status, or the reality, of black English is rooted in American history and has absolutely nothing to do with the question the argument supposes itself to be posing. The argument has nothing to do with language itself but with the role of language. Language, incontestably, reveals the speaker. Language, also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the other--and, in this case, the other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize him. People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate. (And, if they cannot articulate it, they are submerged.) A Frenchman living in Paris speaks a subtly and crucially different language from that of the man living in Marseilles; neither sounds very much like a man living in Quebec; and they would all have great difficulty in apprehending what the man from Guadeloupe, or Martinique, is saying, to say nothing of the man from Senegal--although the "common" language of all these areas is French. But each has paid, and is paying, a different price for this "common" language, in which, as it turns out, they are not saying, and cannot be saying, the same things: They each have very different realities to articulate, or control. What joins all languages, and all men, is the necessity to confront life, in order, not inconceivably, to outwit death: The price for this is the acceptance, and achievement, of one's temporal identity. So that, for example, thought it is not taught in the schools (and this has the potential of becoming a political issue) the south of France still clings to its ancient and musical ProvenÁal, which resists being described as a "dialect." And much of the tension in the Basque countries, and in Wales, is due to the Basque and Welsh determination not to allow their languages to be destroyed. This determination also feeds the flames in Ireland for many indignities the Irish have been forced to undergo at English hands is the English contempt for their language. It goes without saying, then, that language is also a political instrument, means, and proof of power. It is the most vivid and crucial key to identify: It reveals the private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger, public, or communal identity. There have been, and are, times, and places, when to speak a certain language could be dangerous, even fatal. Or, one may speak the same language, but in such a way that one's antecedents are revealed, or (one hopes) hidden. This is true in France, and is absolutely true in England: The range (and reign) of accents on that damp little island make England coherent for the English and totally incomprehensible for everyone else. To open your mouth in England is (if I may use black English) to "put your business in the street": You have confessed your parents, your youth, your school, your salary, your self-esteem, and, alas, your future. Now, I do not know what white Americans would sound like if there had never been any black people in the United States, but they would not sound the way they sound. Jazz , for example, is a very specific sexual term, as in jazz me, baby , but white people purified it into the Jazz Age. Sock it to me, which means, roughly, the same thing, has been adopted by Nathaniel Hawthorne's descendants with no qualms or hesitations at all, along with let it all hang out and right on! Beat to his socks which was once the black's most total and despairing image of poverty, was transformed into a thing called the Beat Generation, which phenomenon was, largely, composed of uptight , middle- class white people, imitating poverty, trying to get down , to get with it , doing their thing , doing their despairing best to be funky , which we, the blacks, never dreamed of doing--we were funky, baby, like funk was going out of style. Now, no one can eat his cake, and have it, too, and it is late in the day to attempt to penalize black people for having created a language that permits the nation its only glimpse of reality, a language without which the nation would be even more whipped than it is. I say that the present skirmish is rooted in American history, and it is. Black English is the creation of the black diaspora. Blacks came to the United States chained to each other, but from different tribes: Neither could speak the other's language. If two black people, at that bitter hour of the world's history, had been able to speak to each other, the institution of chattel slavery could never have lasted as long as it did. Subsequently, the slave was given, under the eye, and the gun, of his master, Congo Square, and the Bible--or in other words, and under these conditions, the slave began the formation of the black church, and it is within this unprecedented tabernacle that black English began to be formed. This was not, merely, as in the European example, the adoption of a foreign tongue, but an alchemy that transformed ancient elements into a new language: A language comes into existence by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the language are dictated by what the language must convey. There was a moment, in time, and in this place, when my brother, or my mother, or my father, or my sister, had to convey to me, for example, the danger in which I was standing from the white man standing just behind me, and to convey this with a speed, and in a language, that the white man could not possibly understand, and that, indeed, he cannot understand, until today. He cannot afford to understand it. This understanding would reveal to him too much about himself, and smash that mirror before which he has been frozen for so long. Now, if this passion, this skill, this (to quote Toni Morrison) "sheer intelligence," this incredible music, the mighty achievement of having brought a people utterly unknown to, or despised by "history"--to have brought this people to their present, troubled, troubling, and unassailable and unanswerable place--if this absolutely unprecedented journey does not indicate that black English is a language, I am curious to know what definition of language is to be trusted. A people at the center of the Western world, and in the midst of so hostile a population, has not endured and transcended by means of what is patronizingly called a "dialect." We, the blacks, are in trouble, certainly, but we are not doomed, and we are not inarticulate because we are not compelled to defend a morality that we know to be a lie. The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in American never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is not the black child's language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way. And, after all, finally, in a country with standards so untrustworthy, a country that makes heroes of so many criminal mediocrities, a country unable to face why so many of the nonwhite are in prison, or on the needle, or standing, futureless, in the streets--it may very well be that both the child, and his elder, have concluded that they have nothing whatever to learn from the people of a country that has managed to learn so little. Return to the Books Home Page

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Analysis of James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on June 20, 2021

“Sonny’s Blues” is a first-person account by an AfricanAmerican schoolteacher trying to come to terms with his younger brother, Sonny, a jazz musician and sometime heroin addict. Some of James Baldwin ’s thematic preoccupations can be ascertained by noting the subtle variations and quasi-musical interplay of motifs: darkness (both atmospheric and existential), (in)audible attempts to articulate or testify, and the spatial coordinates of inside/outside (a complex motif entailing withdrawal into privacy, the filling of voids, and the impulse to escape or transcend compression).

The story begins as a retrospect from darkness. Shocked to read a newspaper account of his brother’s arrest for drug use, the unnamed narrator stares vacantly at his face reflected in the train window, “trapped in the darkness which roared outside” (831). Darkness recurs periodically throughout the narrator’s reminiscence and is often associated with the menace of the outer world. The narrator remembers Sundays at twilight, when as a child he felt “the darkness coming” while registering with anxiety the adults talking darkly of a dark past. His obscure intimations of the possibility of their death are not dispelled when someone turns on a light. Indeed, “when light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness. He knows that every time this happens he’s moved just a little closer to that darkness outside,” which he must endure as his ancestors always have (841–842). One of the incursions of darkness endured by his people has been the murderous running over by whites of his father’s brother, a musician. The narrator’s mother testifies that his father had “never in his life seen any thing as dark as that road after the lights of that car had gone away” (844). As an adult, the narrator muses on the less overt aspects of the darkness that envelops his students: “All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which was now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone” (832).

The narrator begins to realize after many years of conflict with his brother that the blues and jazz represent the antithesis of this escape through distraction into alienated solitude. They constitute a negotiation and transformation of darkness and suffering. Creole, the leader of Sonny’s group, testifies with his bass how innovative jazz approaches to the blues (in this case, be bop) are retelling the tales of “how we suffer . . . and how we may triumph” because they are “the only light we’ve got in all this darkness” (862). However, the intense revelations of light are also risky and potentially destructive. Sitting “in a dark corner” watching his brother and his colleagues preparing to play in their “circle of light,” the narrator notes that they are “most careful not to step into [it] too suddenly,” as if “they would perish in flame” (860). The external dimensions of the darkness of suffering and the light’s threat of exposure are associated with social conditions and a historical legacy, but their existential coordinate is associated with the inner conditions of the self. As Sonny tries, haltingly, to communicate the parameters of where heroin had found him and taken him, his brother notices that “the sun had vanished, soon darkness would fall.” This temporal observation stimulates an intimation of another kind of encroaching darkness: the possibility of Sonny’s relapse, encapsulated by his brother’s warning “It can come again” (859).

The narrator sees Sonny in his students because they are approximately the age that his brother was when he started heroin use and are “filled with rage,” much as Sonny must have been, because of “the low ceiling of their actual possibilities” (832). The narrator’s perception, suffused with guilt and pathos, is acutely attuned to their laughter, which is “insular” with disenchantment (832). Given the story’s preoccupation with finding one’s voice and the riskiness of light, it is significant that when the narrator hears one of the boys whistling, “it seemed to be pouring out of him as though he were a bird . . . moving through all that harsh, bright air, only just holding its own through all those other sounds” (832). After one of his quarrels with Sonny, the emotionally inhibited narrator whistles a blues song “to myself” so as not to cry (852). Baldwin’s images of the (in)audible entail other forms of what might be called injured communication. The narrator inadvertently reveals his cold, uptight-emotional tendencies when he describes “a great block of ice” that “seemed to expand until I felt . . . I was going to choke or scream” (831). The scream of his brother is said to have haunted the narrator’s father the rest of his life, while screaming and choking converge in the memory of the narrator’s traumatized wife, who discovers their daughter, Grace, struggling for air enough to scream: “And when she did scream, it was the worst sound . . . that she’d ever heard in all her life, and she still hears it sometimes in her dreams” (852). The narrator also reports that his wife “will sometimes wake me up with a low, moaning, strangled sound” (852).

Music transmutes these injured sounds, as it does the suffering from which they issue. But the spirituals sung by the street singers, which express a people’s desire for liberation, are contemplated with the ambivalence that Baldwin shows toward African-American Christianity throughout his work. Although everyone has heard these songs, “not one of them had been rescued. Nor had they seen much in the way of rescue work being done around them” (853). The usually passive Sonny forcefully expresses his own ambivalence: “It’s repulsive to think you have to suffer that much” (856). That said, these spirituals not only constitute a major emotional foundation of the blues and jazz, they articulate the quasi-spiritual themes resonating in Baldwin’s description of Sonny’s wilderness wandering and prospects for salvation. Sonny’s piano playing is best understood, as his brother understands it, as a form of “testifying”—a bearing witness to suffering and redemptive aspiration in the manner of the spirituals (853). Thus, when Sonny finally takes his solo from the group, “Every now and again one of them seemed to say, amen” (863). However, before the withdrawn and inarticulate Sonny can speak for himself through his piano, he must first struggle “to find a way to listen” to the soul of the music and to the turbulent, not-yet music in his own soul (857). It is for this reason all the more painful to realize that “ nobody ’s listening.” This situation constitutes a tacit silence inasmuch as he might just as well not be playing. Ultimately, silence testifies to the absence of existential attunement. The narrator belatedly realizes that he “had held silence—so long!” while Sonny, in need of “human speech” and under the pressure of unarticulated feelings, was turning to heroin in the hope of relief (856).

Baldwin’s story insists on the need to escape constricted, pressure-filled spaces. The narrator’s insistence on conventional obligation and responsibility has long put him at odds with his hipster brother’s desire for self-liberation, which he judges an escape from wisdom (838). He feels threatened listening to Sonny’s old friend talk about drug highs, as a jukebox plays: “All this was carrying me some place I didn’t want to go. . . . It filled everything . . . with menace” (835). At the same time he resonates to the lifelong effects of the “smothering” Harlem ghetto, “filled with a hidden menace which was its very breath of life” (839). He remembers how the people “came down into the streets for light and air and found themselves encircled by disaster.” Those who escaped did so “as some animals amputate a leg and leave it in the trap” (839). The new government housing project fails as a haven, a cleared space, because “the hedges will never hold out the streets” and the windows “aren’t big enough to make space out of no space” (839).

Space is not merely a circumscribed set of physical or even social coordinates but an existential-psychological domain of self-definition. Sonny’s greatest pain has resulted from his failure to escape the confines of the sealed space of his privacy. Challenged, he “just moves back inside himself, where he can’t be reached” (840), to “the distant stillness in which he had always moved” (837). Baldwin coordinates inside/outside with the imagery of darkness/light, as when the narrator recalls how Sonny “looked out from the depths of his private life an animal waiting to be coaxed into the light” (837). His inaccessibility makes him seem “some sort of god, or monster . . . as though he were all wrapped up in some cloud, some fire” (850). Inside/ outside is also linked to the (in)audible inasmuch as Sonny’s blues entail the struggle to find a “way of getting it out—that storm inside” (857).

Spatial prepositions are made emphatic the only time Sonny speaks at length to his brother in the attempt to explain what heroin had done for him: “When I was most out of the world, I felt that I was in it, that I was with it, really, and I could play . . . it just came out of me, it was there” (858). Baldwin also deploys spatializing tropes to characterize the addicting quality inherent in music’s capacity to remove the listener from unsatisfying contexts, especially the constricted dimensions of the self. Sonny compares the affect of the street singer’s voice to the feeling of being “distant” yet “in control” that heroin produced— a feeling “you’ve got to have” (855). It had been the need “to clear a space to listen ”—and the inability to locate that place—that had deposited him “all by myself at the bottom of something” (858). Sonny believes that his use of drugs helped him reject unavoidable suffering, “to keep from drowning in it, to keep on top of it.” It had been a means of making him responsible, of providing some demonstrable reason, for that suffering. The conversation ends with a spatial displacement, as Sonny looks onto the street below and observes, “All that hatred and misery and love down there. It’s a wonder it doesn’t blow the avenue apart” (859). There is an especially significant spatializing term in Baldwin’s story. The narrator feels remorse that he has not followed his mother’s counsel regarding Sonny, “you got to let him know you’s there ” (845). And his account culminates with his being there to bear witness and to testify to what his brother undergoes “up there” on the illuminated bandstand.

Descending to the bottom without being destroyed becomes the challenge of Sonny’s playing. Creole, another “witness,” urges Sonny with his bass to “strike out for the deep water . . . that deep water and drowning were not the same thing—he had been there and he knew.” As the narrator watches his brother move “deep within” himself toward the music, he becomes aware of the void that must somehow be made into a livable space—how “awful” it must be for the musician to have “to fill” his instrument “with the breath of life, his own.” The narrator evokes, in terms that are both spatial and redolent with the (in)audible, the pressurized threat that making music entails: “The man who creates the music . . . is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air . . . more terrible because it has no words” (861). Finishing, “Creole and Sonny let out their breath, both soaking wet,” as much from depths descended as from sweat (863).

The story’s recurring references to breath and to personal atmosphere can be profitably linked to the death by constriction of Grace, which functions as a kind of grace. Sitting alone in the dark after burying his daughter and thinking of Sonny, the narrator begins to recognize that “my trouble made his real” (852). Baldwin seems to suggest by this that the inwardness of self need not be hermetic and might provide a route to others. Yet the narrator also remarks “that not many people ever really hear” music, and even “on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations” (861). This principle is perhaps applicable to the narrator’s own concluding description of Sonny’s playing, which does not evoke the music as music so much as the thematic burden the brother is capable of hearing or would like to think he heard. In accord with this principle, the narrator reveals a newfound peace of mind, with but a residue of unease, when he designates the drink he sends his brother “the very cup of trembling” as it glows in the stage lights and shakes with the playing of the band (864). This designation arises from the same biblical source as the spirituals, being an audible renunciation, delivered by a prophet, of God’s threat to destroy a community: “Therefore now hear this, thou afflicted and drunken, but not with wine. . . . Behold I have taken out of thine hand the cup of trembling, even the dregs of the cup of my fury; thou shalt drink it no more” (Isaiah 51:21–22).

Literary Criticism of James Baldwin

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” In Early Novels and Stories. New York: Library of America, 1998. Jones, Jacqueline C. “Finding a Way to Listen: The Emergence of the Hero as an Artist in James Baldwin’s ‘Sonny’s Blues.’ ” CLA Journal 42, no. 4 (1999): 462–482. Sherrard, Tracey. “Sonny’s Bebop: Baldwin’s ‘Blues Text’ as Intracultural Critique.” African American Review 32, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 691–704.

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On James Baldwin’s Unflinching Exposé of American Greed and Racial Terror

Eddie glaude jr. rereads nothing personal.

Nothing Personal is an extraordinary piece of writing—perhaps one of James Baldwin’s most complex essays. In a moment of profound transition in his life as a “witness” and within the compact space of four relatively brief sections, Baldwin lays bare many of the central themes of his corpus. He writes about history, identity, death, and loneliness. The reader gets a sense of the depth of his despair and his desperate hold on to the power of love in what is, by any measure, a loveless world—especially in a country so obsessed with money. In a sense, Nothing Personal sits at the crossroads of his work. The Fire Next Time solidified his fame and status as one of America’s most insightful writers about race and democracy, but the brutal reality of the black freedom struggle—the murder of Medgar Evers, for example, and the terror of Southern sheriffs—forced him to confront, again, the country’s ongoing betrayal. Baldwin, like a conductor approaching a railway switch, signals with this essay the beginning of a shift in tone. Darkness hovers over the writing. One feels his vulnerability on the page.

I must confess that I have rarely lingered here before. I have always read Nothing Personal in relation to Richard Avedon’s photographs: as if the words only offered an interpretation of what I was seeing. Baldwin’s prose was my crutch, because I don’t think I am very good at “seeing” such things. So, I skipped the essay when it was included in the collection The Price of the Ticket ; I preferred reading it alongside the images. But in doing so, I missed something essential: that Nothing Personal was, in its own way, an existential coda for the nation (a fugitive thought, perhaps, in a time when one has to steal moments to think). Baldwin wanted us to confront the loveless character of our lives, the prison of our myths, and the illusion of what we take to be “safety.” Avedon’s images themselves broke up the writing and fragmented the argument about who we are as a nation and, in doing so, somewhat obscured the claim about the perils of American adolescence. I was so focused on the images I couldn’t see the sophisticated stitching of Baldwin’s plea. And, my God, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s presidency, we need to hear that plea clearly in all of its complexity.

In all of these years of reading Baldwin, I never noticed the third sentence of the first section of Nothing Personal . Baldwin begins this section by laying bare the consequences of living in a society so overdetermined by consumerism. He opens with the image of channel surfing (I imagine him holding an old remote control. A recently lit cigarette in one hand, the other clicking the remote over and over again). He describes commercials that promise Americans all sorts of material things that will make our lives meaningful—things that keep us forever young and trap us in our illusions of the wonderful life. It’s like reading Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno about the modern condition and the manipulative nature of the culture industry. Much of this happens in one, seemingly interminable sentence. With dashes and semi-colons Baldwin relentlessly describes what America puts on offer and how we drown in it all. Here, ironically I suppose, he echoes Walt Whitman’s “The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up”—one long sentence about our dead—as he accounts for the death of the American heart.

The long sentence mimics the onslaught of never-ending commercials that affirm the fantasy of American strength and prowess, a fantasy that leaves those of us who bear the brunt of its nonsense, here and abroad, in a state of despair and wonder. (Toni Morrison’s character in Beloved , Stamp Paid, comes to mind: “What are these people?” he asked.) This powerful nation cleaves to myths about itself to evade what Baldwin describes as its “unspeakable loneliness.” Here the modern condition as evidenced in those ghastly commercials takes on a particular kind of resonance—especially in the Jim Crow South.

White Americans, within an “iron cage,” are shackled to a mythical past that blocks them from confronting who they actually are. And this is a key insight for Baldwin, one he takes from The Fire Next Time and rewrites for Nothing Personal : “To be locked in the past means, in effect, that one has no past, since one can never assess it, or use it: and if one cannot use the past, one cannot function in the present, and so one can never be free. I take this to be . . . the American situation in relief, the root of our unadmitted sorrow. . . . ” These particular people are trapped in a history they refused to know but carry within them. The terrors and panic they experience have everything to do with the gap between who they imagine themselves to be and who, deep down, they really are. That the nation actively evades confronting this gap locks the country into a kind of perpetual adolescence where those who desperately hold on to the American myth as some kind of new world Eden refuse to grow up. And, for Baldwin, condemnation to eternal youth is “a synonym for corruption.” Imagine being stuck forever in “Never, Never Land.”

I can’t help but connect this insight to what I witnessed over the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency. Americans who refused to grow up reveled in the fantasy that Trump represented: that ours would remain a white nation in the vein of old Europe. All along it felt like a suppressed terror and panic lurked beneath the surface of their rants and hatreds—that the seams would unravel and reveal the true monstrosity hidden underneath a cheap-ass MAGA hat and T-shirt.

Baldwin opens Nothing Personal then with an extended riff on modern alienation in the context of the unique madness of the United States, a form of madness that still has a claim on us. Here the cold rationalization of modernity with its loss of genuine human intimacy combined with an unwavering faith in money and an unflinching commitment to white supremacy. All of which made the people who furiously walked the streets of this country, avoiding the eyes of those right in front of their faces, vapid and desperately lonely. In the place where dreams supposedly come true, Baldwin seemed to suggest that true joy was both fleeting and fugitive, and this made America a particularly nasty and sad place.

Who and what we have become as individuals in this country, tethered to a past filled with “n*****s” and the white people who so desperately needed them, shape the substance of our living together as well as the self-understanding of the nation, which in turn shapes our individual identities. This hermeneutical circle (as that tortuous sentence reveals) amounts to a distinctive form of hell.

Americans, Baldwin wrote, “are afraid to reveal ourselves because we trust ourselves so little.” We lie about our virtue. We lie about our history to conceal our torment. In effect, Baldwin declared, “we live by lies.” And those lies extend beyond matters of race and cut to the heart of our self-conception. Baldwin understood that our problems in the United States went beyond politics or the latest example of American racism. In a post-Trump world, we will soon see that he was not our only problem—just another indication of a more deep-seated American malaise. Baldwin wrote of the lies that take root in the “secret chambers of our hearts”:

Nothing more sinister can happen, in any society, to any people. And when it happens, it means that the people are caught in a kind of vacuum between their present and their past—the romanticized, that is, the maligned past, and the denied and dishonored present. It is a crisis of identity. And in such a crisis, at such a pressure, it becomes absolutely indispensable to discover, or invent . . . the stranger, the barbarian, who is responsible for our confusion and our pain. Once he is driven out—destroyed—then we can be at peace: those questions will be gone. Of course, those questions never go, but it has always seemed much easier to murder than to change. And this is really the choice with which we are confronted now.

The country needs its “n*****s,” its Islamic “terrorists,” its “illegal aliens” to hold together a fragile identity that always seems to be on the verge of falling apart. The dangers, on this view, lie without and not within. (But Baldwin had already written in 1962 in an essay for the New York Times Book Review , after saying that the loneliness Dos Passos wrote about is now greater than ever before, that “the trouble is deeper than we wished to think: the trouble is in us.”) If I am reading Nothing Personal correctly, the country needs its “strangers” to resolve the sense of alienation that threatens to suffocate this place. The enemy and evil without, and the violence we exact upon the threat they present or directly upon them, keeps us whole while the rot within corrupts everything.

Nothing Personal exposes all of this without a hint of sentimentality: that our failure to trust others, and more importantly, ourselves makes us mysteries to one another. Our greed and insatiable desire to hold on to what we have makes us susceptible to the lies; in fact, we become apostles of lies that justify the evils that make our way of life possible.

All of which makes love, genuine love, damn near impossible here. As Baldwin put it, “This is no place for love.” He echoed this sentiment in No Name in the Street (1972): “I have always been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep, that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life. This is what makes them so baffling, so moving, so exasperating, and so untrustworthy.” Here we are today, even after the Trump presidency, and much remains the same.

In this essay, Baldwin exposes what motivates our nightly terrors. There is an emptiness here, and no amount of material possessions can fill it. There is an emptiness in us. And if we are to get at the root of white supremacy’s hold on our lives, we will have to confront that emptiness directly, without the security of our legends. For Baldwin, this is no abstract matter, and one sees this at the end of Nothing Personal . Baldwin reveals his own torment—the desperation felt in the four a.m. hour that leads to a version of the question William James asked himself in 1895, “Is life worth living?” He knew, in his bones, that the specter of death, in the full light of our own failures and inadequacies, shadows our living and that our only recourse is the love of another human being.

The irony, of course, is that this must happen in such a loveless place. Baldwin has already said that America is not a place for love, but those words reflect the license of an artist. He knows love saved him, even though he never really believed that anyone could actually love him. And it is in this contrast that his faith in us is expressed: that in this country which refuses to grow up—that longs to be “the ageless American boy” and seeks refuge from responsibility in titillating and fleeting pleasures that offer the illusion of safety—we will one day “evolve into the knowledge that human beings are more important than real estate and will permit this knowledge to become the ruling principle of our lives.”

While in Puerto Rico on vacation with his lover, Lucien Happersberger, Baldwin heard the news of the assassination of Medgar Evers, and he began writing Nothing Personal under the shadow of that death. Baldwin’s family would later join him on the island—even his mother, Berdis, who did not like to fly, came. Among the many joys experienced, the family sat and read parts of Baldwin’s new play, Blues for Mister Charlie . Between death and love, Baldwin found a way. Nothing Personal is a eulogy of sorts and a declaration of the will.

In the end, the power of love, of loving someone and of being loved, equips us to endure the world as it is and to imagine the world as it could be. Even the emptiness of America can be overcome, Baldwin maintained. We have the litany of the saints to bear witness to such a fact. They are those who through the horror and brutality of American life still loved and refused to die. William James answered the question “Is life worth living?” by asserting the power of belief: if you believe life is worth living, that belief will help create the fact. Baldwin finds no comfort in such abstractions, especially at four o’clock in the morning, when despair has one by the throat. Instead, the answer is found in the love of others who brought us through the storming sea—a kind of love that can break the sickness at the heart of America’s darkness.

__________________________________

Excerpted from Nothing Personal by James Baldwin. Foreword by Imani Perry. Afterword by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. (Beacon Press, 2021). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

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James Baldwin's Stranger in the Village: An Essay in Black and White

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James Baldwin Review

Paola Bacchetta , Patricia Purtschert

“Baldwin’s Transatlantic Reverberations: Between ‘Stranger in the Village’ and I Am Not Your Negro.” Paola Bacchetta, Jovita dos Santos Pinto, Noémi Michel, Patricia Purtschert, and Vanessa Näf. James Baldwin Review, vol. 6., 176-198. (Fall 2020). James Baldwin’s writing, his persona, as well as his public speeches, interviews, and discussions are undergoing a renewed reception in the arts, in queer and critical race studies, and in queer of color movements. Directed by Raoul Peck, the film I Am Not Your Negro decisively contributed to the rekindled circulation of Baldwin across the Atlantic. Since 2017, screenings and commentaries on the highly acclaimed film have prompted discussions about the persistent yet variously racialized temporal-spatial formations of Europe and the U.S. Stemming from a roundtable that fol- lowed a screening in Zurich in February 2018, this collective essay wanders between the audio-visual and textual matter of the film and Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village,” which was also adapted into a film-essay directed by Pierre Koralnik, staging Baldwin in the Swiss village of Leukerbad. Privileging Black feminist, post- colonial, and queer of color perspectives, we identify three sites of Baldwin’s trans- atlantic reverberations: situated knowledge, controlling images, and everyday sexual racism. In conclusion, we reflect on the implications of racialized, sexualized politics for today’s Black feminist, queer, and trans of color movements located in continental Europe—especially in Switzerland and France.

African American Review

Gerald David Naughton

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: In titling their ambitious new volume James Baldwin: America and Beyond, editors Cora Kaplan and Bill Schwarz make a bold claim of inclusivity. As they state in their Introduction to the collection, “the salient point resides in the conjunction” (4): the key to understanding Baldwin in a global era is in analyzing how this extraordinary writer managed to embed the national in the transnational, and vice versa. “Our concern,” Kaplan and Schwarz state from the outset, “is how he imagined America and beyond” (4). The volume is thus more or less neatly cleaved into two sections: first, “What it Means to Be an American,” and then “A Stranger in the Village.” At their most successful, however, the scholars and intellectuals gathered in this collection eschew such easy distinctions, showing how inadequate clear divisions become when applied to a writer as rich, complicated, and paradoxical as James Baldwin. To give just a few examples from the volume (many would have been possible), we may turn first to Douglas Field’s essay “What is Africa to Baldwin?: Cultural Illegitimacy and the Step-fatherland” (209-28), which prominently situates his analysis of Baldwin’s attitude toward the culture and politics of Africa within a careful discussion of the writer’s early life as a preacher in Harlem and his decisive relationship with his father. Baldwin’s “complicated shifting views on Africa,” according to Field, are rooted in his “troubled relationship with his father” (210). This builds a biographical frame that situates Africa within Harlem, the political within the personal, and “beyond” within “America,” thus avoiding unhelpful dichotomies. Vaughn Rasberry’s” ‘Now Describing You’: James Baldwin and Cold War Liberalism” (84-105) similarly connects the national with the transnational; here, the locus of connection is the Cold War and its intimate (for Baldwin) links with civil rights-era racial discourse in the United States. Making such perceptive and unexpected connections was the very lifeblood of Baldwin’s political thought. Kevin Birmingham also outlines this in his essay,” ‘History’s Ass Pocket’: The Sources of Baldwinian Diaspora” (141-58), which explores the interplay of Israel and West Africa in establishing Baldwin’s national and transnational vision. In Birmingham’s view, “Baldwin discovered the complexity of the relationship between privacy and nationhood through a frame of reference that seems impertinent to both the private life and the national life: through his transnational life” (144). Such unlikely sources, unexpected connections, and paradoxical conjunctions are explored throughout the volume—new points of analysis which are essential if we are to genuinely expand our conception of Baldwin’s diverse and multifaceted legacy. It may be pertinent to note here that the project of broadening the critical focus on Baldwin is neither completely unique nor entirely new. James Baldwin: America and Beyond is, rather, the latest step in a project arguably initiated by the Dwight A. McBride-edited James Baldwin Now (1999) and D. Quentin Miller’s Re-Viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen (2000). Both of those texts expressed their discontent with what Miller described as the “frustrating” tendency of “literary criticism to fragment (Baldwin’s) vision” (233). More recent scholarship on the writer has continued to broaden our critical understanding of his vision and his writing—among the more prominent examples of this development, we may consider Magdalena J. Zaborowska’s James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (2008), Douglas Field’s James Baldwin (2011), and the Randall Kenan-edited The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (2011). All of these studies hinge on the conjunctions in Baldwin’s writing: the American and the transnational, the political and the aesthetic; the fiction and the nonfiction; the early works and the late works, et cetera. For too long, as Kaplan and Schwarz put it, “one Baldwin has been pitted against another Baldwin, producing a series of polarities that has skewed our understanding” (3). The collection under discussion here is, therefore, to be welcomed. And yet, we may ask ourselves why—despite the worthy efforts of volumes like those cited above—such critical rallying calls remain necessary. In one of the most dynamic essays in the collection, Robert Reid-Pharr (126-38) astringently argues that Baldwin scholarship, far from expanding...

Karoline Heien

Alexa Kurmanova

Oana Cogeanu

Ernesto Martinez

Contemporary Political Theory

Lisa A Beard

This article identifies a concept I call ‘boundness’ in James Baldwin’s work and asks how it offers an alternative and embodied way to theorize racial identity, racialized violence and interracial solidarity. In the 1960s, in contrast to black nationalist and integrationist responses to racial domination, Baldwin repeatedly asserts that white and black people are literally bound (by blood) and therefore morally bound together. He posits a kinship narrative that foregrounds racialized/sexual violence, addressing the histories of Southern plantations and Jim Crow communities where lines of racial difference were drawn between siblings or between an enslaved child and his/her biological father. With particular attention to Baldwin’s rhetorical techniques (use of racial signifiers, pronouns, familial language), this article examines boundness in four main texts – White Man’s Guilt, The Fire Next Time, a 1963 Public Broadcasting Service interview and a 1968 speech in London – and demonstrates how the concept functions as a political strategy to provoke shifts in identification.

Brigitte Pawliw-Fry

James Baldwin's short story, "Going to Meet the Man," fictionalizes the "personal incoherence" of white America that he describes in his essay, "The White Man's Guilt." Those "stammering, terrified dialogues" of incoherence manifest in the language used by Jesse, the protagonist, as he attempts to narrate his experience. Yet this "personal incoherence" plays a role in perpetuating racist violence, as Jesse's encounter with a lynching transforms him and his language, as he accepts the incoherence of his father's world view. Through this, Baldwin shows that vague and imprecise language is a tool in justifying, and thus perpetuating, white supremacy. But first, I will provide a reading of "The White Man's Guilt" to define what I mean by "personal incoherence" in the context of the short story, and will then explore the reading from scholar Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman of Baldwin's specific construction of white identity formation (723). After these sections, I will pursue a chronologic structure of Jesse's developments, which enacts his socialization process.

John E. Drabinski

Draft of an essay on James Baldwin's quasi-dialectical conception of racial formation. In particular, I focus on how white identity is structured by its own fantasy of blackness - a dialectic motivated by anti-black racism and its projection of identity. Baldwin's negative dialectic shifts focus from the play of anti-blackness to the remainder and remnant he calls "the Negro," an identity simultaneously inside and outside the dialectic of racial formation. This double-session of racial formation is Baldwin's account of the possibility of the positivity of Black life, an account that takes the nihilism of race realism seriously while also describing the formation of African-American culture outside that nihilism.

Film Quarterly

Warren Crichlow

Thirty years after James Baldwin's untimely death at the age of 63, Haitian-born Raoul Peck makes good on Baldwin's spirited prophecy through his timely and intrepidly titled I Am Not Your Negro (2016). In his rendezvous with Baldwin, Peck carries Baldwin's prescient voice into the twenty-first century, where his rhetorical practice of “telling it like it is” resonates anew in this perilous political moment. Drawing on his signature practice of reanimating the archive through bricolage, Peck not only represents but also remobilizes Baldwin's image repertoire, helping to conjugate the very idea of this revered—and often criticized—novelist and essayist to renewed effect. Like audiences of an earlier era, today's viewers become spellbound by this critical witness's fervent idiomatic eloquence and uncompromising vision. Crichlow argues that Baldwin's journey is palpably not over—perhaps just beginning. The film makes certain his illuminating prose and penetr...

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James Baldwin

From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter

Baldwin’s Better Argument

In his essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin critiques Uncle Tom’s Cabin and makes a compelling argument for why it is a protest novel. He explains the dangers of its sentimentality and unrealistic characterization, and because of his strong rhetoric, I agree with his position. Baldwin outlines how Uncle Tom’s Cabin denies the complexity of the truth by focusing solely on convincing the reader that slavery is wrong. He details how the book fails to explain what motivated white people to commit such atrocities. In doing so, Baldwin provides strong evidence for his contention that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a protest novel and thus, is “forgiven, on the strength of [its] good intentions, whatever violence [it does] to language, whatever excessive demands [it makes] of credibility” (18). 

Baldwin’s essay only ever addresses Native Son in its final two pages. He gives himself very little room to support his claims with examples and to elaborate upon his comparisons, as he does with Stowe’s book. As a result, his assessment of Wright’s work as a protest novel is less persuasive than it could be, diminishing the strength of his argument. Baldwin alleges that Native Son is “a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy” (22). However, he does not show us why that is. The only support he offers this comparison is his assertion that Bigger must “battle for his humanity” (23). In his view, this battle defines Native Son as a protest novel, since such works deny the humanity of its characters by adhering to the importance of their categorization instead. At that point, Baldwin ends his essay. He does not support his claim that Bigger is battling for his humanity, but rather assumes that point, and he fails to provide a reason why the existence of that supposed battle renders Native Son a protest novel. He writes that “we need not battle for [our humanity]; we need only… to accept it” (23). If Baldwin explained the difference between battling for humanity and learning to accept it; if he showed how Wright’s work is the former and not the latter; and if he clarified why the battle itself constitutes a rejection of humanity, then his argument would be improved. Instead, he leaves the reader with every opportunity to question it.