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Baldwin and Identity ...8 JUST ABOVE MY HEAD: JAMES BALDWIN’S CULTURAL IDENTITY POLITICS By MAURICE ANTHONY EVERS A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF OF MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2015 © 2015 Maurice Anthony Evers To my parents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my parents, family, and everyone who supported me intellectually and emotionally during the writing of this thesis. A special thank you to Dr. Mark Reid, who has been most influential in my thinking, reading, and writing over the past two years and especially, in this thesis, and to Dr. Laurie Gries, who was instrumental in the writing of this project. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: BALDWIN AND IDENTITY .......................................................... 8 2 BALDWIN’S CHARACTERS AND THE ARTIST’S BURDEN ................................. 30 3 A (RE)READING OF BALDWIN ............................................................................. 38 LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................... 43 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ............................................................................................ 45 5 Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts JUST ABOVE MY HEAD: JAMES BALDWIN’S CULTURAL IDENTITY POLITICS By Maurice A. Evers December 2015 Chair: Mark Reid Major: English Borrowing from the cultural studies theoretical works as Stuart Hall’s “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” and bell hook’s Black Looks: Race and Representation, I study how the writer James Baldwin identifies and disidentifies from the idea of a holistic cultural-political racial, gender and sexual identity. Since, I argue that his work is a dynamo of being/becoming gender and sexuality that transgress the conventional boundaries of gender and sexual norms. This is most illustrated in Baldwin’s Just Above My Head. For Baldwin, self-definition is a constant and fluctuating act that stimulates self-revolution. I open my analysis describing how Baldwin constructs identity through both resistance and self-definition. Thereafter, I recover how both the artist-witness (a quintessential Baldwin character) and the artist’s burden acts a fundamental Baldwin trope that builds on resistance and self-definition through close reading a single text. Here, I uncover how, for Baldwin, identity formation is dependent on suffering, diaspora, etc. Ultimately, I analyze the ways in which Baldwin contributes to In reexamining Baldwin’s later work, I reassess the recent discussions on James 6 Baldwin’s late works to reappraise his contributions to established and emerging discourses. 7 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: BALDWIN AND IDENTITY Throughout James Baldwin’s prolific four-decade career as the only major African American writer whose career spanned the pre- and post civil rights and black power movement period (Orilla Scott 10), his work delves into diverse and interrelated tropes, such as: mythology of race in America; constructed American ideals of gender and sexuality; love and sexuality as mobilizing vehicles of revolution; organized religions, specifically Judeo-Christian and various theologies, ideologies, and theoretical frameworks in the American consciousness; the language and music of African Americans; and the ontology of humanness. I argue that of all Baldwin’s recurrent themes, identity remains the focus of his work. However, Lynn Orilla Scott posits in James Baldwin’s Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey: “not attainment of identity, but rather toward knowledge of self as implicated, situated subject, but simultaneously as other and therefore as resisting agent” (7). Baldwin insists the awareness or meaning of identity is a combination of self and other that affords one to transgress boundaries. This is Baldwin’s most prevalent trope, which he foregrounds in most of his work. Furthermore, his preoccupation with and constant critique of social categories is relentless in his writing. Lastly, the knowledge of self and other affords resistance. I will return often to the notions of identity, self, and other as agentive forces throughout this thesis. In his groundbreaking first collection of biographical essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955), Baldwin writes “Our passion for categorization, life neatly fitted into pegs, has led to an unforeseen, paradoxical distress; confusion, a breakdown of meaning. Those categories which were meant to define and control the world for us 8 have boomeranged us into chaos,” (“Everybody’s Protest Novel” 35). Baldwin views living according to one’s own definitions a moral, righteous, honest way of life. Indeed, in his autobiographical prose fiction and nonfiction essays, recorded and published dialogues, debates, and speeches, Baldwin routinely interrogates conventional social categories and in so doing defines his personal identity through a “being/becoming” dynamo (Stuart Hall “Cultural Identity of Diaspora”) and reinvents himself. Orilla Scott notes: “Baldwin consistently defied categorical thinking and practice, challenging the binaries of black/white, male/female, gay/straight, as well as the divisions of literary genres, particularly that between autobiography and fiction,” (xiii). Most important are the literary genres that Baldwin simultaneously contests and blurs, particularly the autobiographical and fictional genres, both which Orilla Scott argues ground his final novel, and which I contend ground the majority of his oeuvre overall, fictional and nonfictional alike. Likewise, David Leeming, a Baldwin scholar, former secretary and long-time friend, in his comprehensive biography called, “James Baldwin: A Biography,” asserts that Baldwin considered himself his own biographer through his work. Thus, in what follows, I close read Baldwin’s sociopolitical nonfiction and the foremost fiction prose I am concerned with here, his final novel Just Above My Head (1979), to conduct both literary and rhetorical criticism. These two methods of analysis are productive because they allow me to critique Baldwin and his work to identify, describe, and analyze the ways in which he and his three central characters in Just Above My Head, Hall and Arthur Montana and Julia Miller, resist dehumanizing social categorizations. They do so to transgress constructed identity markers and 9 boundaries to define identity for themselves, apart from normalized historical, sociopolitical, ideological, and cultural conventions and effectively make themselves. These characters and their individual identities represent another important Baldwin trope to my thesis, the artist-witness. The artist-witness personifies art as a vehicle for witness that cannot be denied and makes himself the vehicle for a people's pain (Leeming). Through self-defined identity and art, one can witness to the events and suffering of one's life and report back to the community at large, what Baldwin refers to as "sorrow songs." This song operates Baldwin performs this role over his literary career. For Baldwin and his characters, self-definition is a quotidian act that could potentially actualize self-revolution. Accordingly, I undertake a character study of the aforementioned characters, particularly focusing my attention on the artist’s burden in Chapter 2. Furthermore, recovering Baldwin as an important black American intellectual, literary figure, and I would even argue a literary scholar (he was a ferocious reader of the “classics” and undertook literary criticism throughout his career), and rhetorician who makes a certain contribution to the fields of literary studies and rhetorical studies specifically (among many others) is an important task. Doing so illuminates his enduring legacy and also underscores his immeasurable contribution to the current sociopolitical climate and adds to the development of the new black intelligentsia, as we now begin to comprehend his contribution to American culture at large through renewed interest in, current discussions on and critiques of Baldwin’s work, i.e., the bourgeoning “Baldwin studies.” Because of these reasons, then, I reread Baldwin, and particularly his later under-read and critically under examined work, in a new light with new appreciation and 10 application to established and emerging theoretical frameworks, a gesture I make primarily in the conclusion in Chapter 3. Additionally, in our so-called “post-racial” or colorblind society, it is important to reappraise the work of a pioneer of Baldwin’s caliber in the areas of race, gender, and sexuality studies. I argue, rereading Baldwin’s work will enlighten modalities of self- revolution in a society where fixed social identities, i.e., racial make up, gender identity and sexual orientation, make people fit to die. Thus, my thesis is a contribution to ongoing identity politics conversations in our current sociopolitical climate where race, gender, and sexuality relations are characterized by contemporary intersectional movements such as Black Lives Matter, a response to anti-Black racism and police brutality founded by three gay black women: Opal Tometi, Patrisse Cullors, and Alicia Garza. Interestingly,
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