Baldwin and Identity ...8

Home , A Rap on Race, Just Above My Head

JUST ABOVE MY HEAD: JAMES BALDWIN’S CULTURAL IDENTITY POLITICS

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

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.

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

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

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

Baldwin’s late works to reappraise his contributions to established and emerging discourses.

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

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

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, they are not generally acknowledged as the movements’ founders because of racial, gender, and sexual politics and erasure of black feminist voices in the mainstream. Therefore, I argue, Baldwin’s work affords agency to the marginalized, even now in endemic contemporary contexts.

Furthermore, in an effort to contextualize the parameters of my argument and

Baldwin’s resistance within this social place, I first provide a general definition of identity and situate Baldwin in a public rather than academic context that he occupies. Next, I define “cultural identity” more specifically in a cultural studies framework, borrowing from Stuart Hall’s “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” and from bell hooks’ Black Looks:

Race and Representation to situate both Baldwin and his characters in a fictional and theoretical world he creates and subsequently transgresses. It is important to note here that, to my knowledge, there is no evidence in biographies, scholarship and content

(films, interviews, speeches, etc.,) on, about, and given by Baldwin or in his work itself to suggest that he read any academic writing, until perhaps his later appointments as a visiting professor at various universities. This is all the more significant because it exemplifies Baldwin’s brilliance in his contribution to academic discourses without being an academic himself.

Merriam-Webster defines identity as: “who someone is: the name of a person; the qualities, beliefs, etc., that make a particular person or group different from others.”

What is interesting in this definition is that to consider identity in a general Western context, i.e., Merriam-Webster, is to associate one’s identity with essentialized “qualities and beliefs.” Given such assumption and definition, it is important to identify one's character and to reconcile one to his qualities and beliefs to then recognize “who someone is.” It is also interesting to note that to simultaneously reduce and identify someone to/by his character(istics) would categorize a person in systematic modalities of representation of sameness and difference. Then, to collate or name a person by essential qualities would qualify a person’s credentials, which are used to relegate him both to/in/of a group and also outside/apart from a group, respectively. In other words, one’s identity systemically marks a person’s sameness and difference, makes “a particular person or group different (or the same) from others,” and thus, names a person. Baldwin calls attention to the tension of this classification between name and identity, and moreover, sameness and difference, for example, in aptly titled collections of essays, including Nobody Knows My Name and No Name in the Street, in which he critically interrogates the notion of identity, of both individual and collective identity, in essays, such as “The Discovery of What It Means To Be An American,” “Notes for a

Hypothetical Novel,” and “The Male Prison,” and in essays in Notes of a Native Son in works, such as “Many Thousands Gone,” “A Question of Identity,” and “Stranger in the

Village.”

In these essays, Baldwin appeals to his name, and more importantly, that nobody knows it, which means, for Baldwin, no one can define or describe him. He wrestles with the concept of identity to articulate a rhetorical move that highlights the complexities of his content and/of his character, or more to the point, his identity. What should not be lost in the titles or the rhetorical strategies of these essays, however, is the interplay between sameness and difference that Baldwin vacillates between, which serve to mark his sameness and difference to and from, for example, his family, his community, his country, his culture, and humanity. This interplay is primarily evidenced in essays like,

“The Male Prison,” with emphasis on male as individual, personal, singular or particular experience or that of “the self” or subjectivity and simultaneously of prison as a communal, collective, or shared experience amongst many similar and different people or that of “the other,” objectivity, and otherness. In “The Male Prison,” Baldwin interrogates the fixed binaries of gender and sexuality that lock males specifically and humans generally in the metaphorical prison of the mind and body via categorization.

Baldwin's fixation on identity should not be overlooked as incidental or irrelevant.

Rather, it should be understood in the larger context of his ongoing engagement with and contribution to established and emerging fields of academic inquiry through the critical examination of his work, which I develop more in the conclusion in Chapter 3.

Because identity is predicated on the naming of essential qualities and beliefs that first name a person, then simultaneously associates or identifies a person in/to a

group and disassociates or disidentifies a person from a group, Baldwin’s positionality or his “identity” as a “gay” or “bisexual Black male,” inherently opposes categorizations because each are menaced and marginalized identities. Then, without first naming, making himself and his identity legible by identifying with a particular binary or category, history, nor society, nor politics, nor ideology, nor culture can locate or read him, his name, or his identity. His identity is individual, personal or particular, and human, however never general or generic or shared, and thus not open to interpretation, definition, description, labeling, and ultimately, not open to categorization.

That nobody knows his name highlights the tension between the dichotomy of the familiar and the foreign, as, for instance, the general public certainly know his name as one of the most celebrated novelists, essayists, activists of his time but do not know or cannot locate it or his identity (i.e. No Name in the Street) precisely because of his rhetoric and the many instances in which he disidentifies norms. Baldwin builds on the strain between these dichotomies elsewhere and in Just Above My Head particularly between the familiar and the foreign, to which I’ll return later in this chapter and also in

Chapter 2. Additionally, such a rhetorical move informs the ways Baldwin’s discourse and his fierce examination of historicized and idealistic American/European, white supremacy operates in the contexts of invented categorization(s), which Baldwin never ceased to point out. Put another way, as long as nobody knows his name, he signifies the ways that no one can label him or neatly box him into categories and impose upon him various identities, for example, those discussed above: gay, bisexual, Black, male.

Baldwin writes to his nephew James in The Fire Next Time (1963): “You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger (10)…It

was intended that you should perish by never being allowed to go beyond the white man’s definitions, by never being allowed to spell your proper name” (16). Here,

Baldwin contests the very notion of identities as labels and labels as identities and writes to empower fluidity to maneuver through and beyond such limiting and coerced labels as identities, which devour categorized people. Therefore, he deploys resistance through or within self-definition to transgress invented conventional sociopolitical boundaries that attempt to delimit artificial boundaries of his (and his nephew’s, or here, as the self and other, the familiar and the foreign as in the familial) personhood specifically and the ontology of his humanness generally. In other words, for Baldwin, invented categories of identity work to deemphasize one’s identity, decenter subjectivity, and dehumanize individuals, whereas self-definition is one way to resist, transgress, and survive the artificial boundaries that annihilate humanity. Thus, for Baldwin, self- definition is a quotidian act of resistance, a disruption of the status quo that could eventually galvanize self-revolution.

In “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings the Blues for Mister Charlie,”

Koritha Mitchell asserts:

For Baldwin, this [resisting categories] is the highest of achievements because it has become so rare and because it is the key to rediscovering the truth that Americans have ignored by opting to live according to invented categories and disconnected fantasies. Though humans share common flesh, much has been done, especially in the United States, to deny and conceal this fact. Social and racial categories have been constructed to ensure that we do not recognize each other as brothers and sisters, and they have been largely successful. (36)

Baldwin’s understanding of self-identity is imperative to comprehend on several levels.

First, as I have argued from the start, Baldwin rejects American social conventions and fantasies, which he perceives as obstacles to healthy identity formation. That is, living

according to invented categories within dualistic binaries as are black/white, male/female, gay/straight maintain white supremacy. Baldwin expresses this in the speech, “A World I Never Made,” “the person who has defined the other, and marked him for death, has not so much defined the other as defined himself” (qtd. in Leeming

354). Additionally, Baldwin emphasizes this in Notes of a Native Son. He asserts, “It was necessary to hold on to the things that mattered…blackness and whiteness did not matter; to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one’s own destruction.” Given

Baldwin’s history and logic of resisting binaries and boundaries, just as blackness and whiteness do not matter here, neither do male/female and gay/straight categories, and categories more generally. Because Baldwin believed that humans share common flesh and blood, as he enumerated often throughout his career, with such eloquence: “We are all of us kinfolk,” then to divorce one from another, as to disconnect brothers and sisters from brothers and sisters metaphorically, metaphysically, and physically, is to deny one’s own flesh and blood. Thus, this denial disavows oneself, one's family, one's essential humanity, and one’s identity.

Baldwin’s theory of the familial ties together people of different cultures as he

(re)connects them to their various pasts, presents, and futures. It should be noted, however, that I am chiefly concerned with blacks and whites for my purposes here, as

Baldwin generally was in his writing as well. For Baldwin, then, identity is an assemblage to ancestry (Popova), a sentiment that reconnects the notion of the familiar and the foreign, i.e., the self and other, sameness and difference, through the portrayal and acceptance or denial of flesh and blood in the American context. That is, the familial, commonly held simultaneously familiar—in that identification with/of the familial

is recognizable as a familiar “identity,” and foreign—when denounced/disidentified as unrelated. For example, consider the nomenclature of familial designations of “brother and sister,” by which the sharing of flesh and blood binds legally, and biologically, i.e., one family. Then, when family designations take shape, names and identities instantly become shared experiences, across flesh and blood lines, for instance, in the case of the family name, commonly shared amongst its members across flesh and blood lines, i.e. various people share one family name, a common family identity/pride, and build community.

Thus, Baldwin sees veracity in the connectedness and communion of identity, as in family or community, though not in the categorical sense, which stress Baldwin’s sociopolitical sense of identity and reality. However, that Americans do not live according to a factual accuracy, in the acknowledgement or denial that race is a social construct, and a psychological and pathological condition, but according to disconnected fantasies aided and abetted, concealed and denied by omnipresent rhetoric and myths of white supremacy, creates more than a distrust between and disservice for Americans. These assumptions also menace all Americans, reveal much about the psyche, and creates a terrible conundrum by which people live and die.

Furthermore, Baldwin insists through his work that the problem of categorization, here race, says more about white (and black) Americans, and particularly those who believe the nonsense, than it does about the white (and black) Americans who do not (Baldwin would consider these Americans, “relatively conscious”), in which it implicates and condemns all Americans too, as he alludes to in “Many Thousands Gone”: “where no one’s hands are clean,” (96). Furthermore, writing about his father to his nephew in The

Fire Next Time, Baldwin notes: “You may be like your grandfather…Well, he is dead, he never saw you, and he had a terrible life; he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him,” (9).

Moreover, Baldwin once said in a 1961 interview with Studs Terkel:

I couldn’t accept what I had been told. All you are ever told in this country about being black is that it is a terrible, terrible thing to be. Now, in order to survive this, you have to really dig down into yourself and re-create yourself, really, according to no image, which yet exists in America. You have to impose, in fact—this may sound very strange—you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you. (Conversations with James Baldwin 5-6)

I want to both reiterate and clarify that Baldwin’s sense of identity does not depend on someone else’s naming or description or imagining of him and his identity, rather his resistance in accepting others’ definitions necessitates and facilitates his ability and his need to (re-)create himself. I mean here that for Baldwin to re-create himself in a new identity, he must first come to terms with an existing prescribed and predetermined image, an “imago” that imposes and shapes one’s life. For Baldwin, or anyone else, to create a new, self-defined identity that opposes a pre-defined identity, one has to decide for him or herself, as Baldwin indicates in “Many Thousands Gone”: “To tell his story… to begin to liberate us from his image and it is, for the first time, to clothe this phantom with flesh and blood, to deepen, by our understanding of him and his relationship to us, our understanding of ourselves and of all men,” (95). Thus, self-defining and witnessing are the central missions Baldwin undertakes throughout his career and in Just Above

My Head, that is to define, describe, and identify himself in his work, and to tell his,

Hall’s, Arthur’s, and Julia’s story in the process.

Baldwin’s concentrates on imagery or the representation or a specific portrayal of

“blackness” that lives in the imaginary and as the reality of others who identify or are

identified as such. Therefore, Baldwin writes to present and represent an authentic and truthful image of himself both as self and other, for the individual and community in line with the identity he (re-)creates. The identity and truth Baldwin seeks and disseminates here and the identity he self-defines demonstrates his “writerly” authority, more on this aspect in Chapter 3.

Baldwin’s perspective on identity places him in a geopolitical history, highlighted by the global implications of diaspora, and particularly of the Transatlantic Slave Trade between North America, the Caribbean, Brazil, Europe, and Africa. The geographical, economic, and sociopolitical implications of such coerced movement led to what

Baldwin refers to as “the Negro past.” This past shapes the present and future through the violence which simultaneously subsumes and creates blackness through “peculiar race-making institutions” for example, chattel or racial slavery of the plantation, Jim

Crow, the ghetto, the hyperghetto and mass incarceration (Loic Wacquant). Baldwin attacks each of these institutions at various points and places throughout his career.

Moreover, race making is but another reason to create one's identity, apart from the identity that shapes and identifies the culture of blackness. Then, for Baldwin, out of the forced migration creates “transnational localities” that emerge in the everyday that serve to create new home-places across nations of the internationally dispersed, yet another theme Baldwin takes up in Just Above My Head.

The purchase, enslavement, and spillage of flesh and blood of our ancestors, that is, flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood because there is only one race, the human race, as Baldwin often alluded, are constituent elements of the slave trade and

blackness. Out of the slave trade came the Negro past and the suffering that Baldwin decries throughout his work. Baldwin writes in The Fire Next Time of the Negro past:

Of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone around him denied it; sorrow for his women, for his kinfolk, for his children, who needed his protection, and whom he could not protect; rage, hatred, and murder, hatred for white men so deep that it often turned against him and his own, and made all love, all trust, all joy impossible—this past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful. I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering—enough is certainly as good as a feast—but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. (121- 122)

I quote at length because it is important to my argument, my thesis, and to where I intend to eventually go in my Ph.D. dissertation, to describe then analyze suffering because of its power to bridge relationships and community, without ever feeling the need to gesture toward some hopeful or optimistic or untenable solution. Baldwin avoids these empty gestures most noticeably toward the end of his career culminating in Just

Above My Head.

Baldwin’s emphasis on suffering, the benefit in and necessity of suffering, is but another pivotal Baldwin leitmotif present in Just Above My Head with each of its three main characters, Hall, Arthur, and Julia, experiencing suffering to varying degrees. In his essay, “James Baldwin's Vision of Otherness and Community,” Emmanuel S.

Nelson synthesizes Baldwin’s theme of self-identity in conjunction with and the need for suffering: “Reaching a genuine sense of self and forging an identity depend largely on self-knowledge and self-awareness which, according to Baldwin, come only through suffering. In other words, suffering, if endured creatively, leads to self-knowledge, which, in return, can offer the possibility of achieving a genuine sense of self. Hence

suffering has humanizing power and redemptive potential” (121). An important facet to note here that Nelson does not consider is that Baldwin extends in his novels, and particularly in his later novels, creative enduring of suffering, which his protagonists Leo

Proudhammer in Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, Fonny in If Beale Street

Could Talk to Arthur and Julia in Just Above My Head all find a way to accomplish for themselves. Each character in his/her own way, in his/her artistic voice, in spite of his/her unique burden, from actor to sculptor to musicians and model, deal with, describe, and analyze suffering through some sort of language, i.e., the African

American religious rhetoric or African American cultural production, such as music, art, and writing to reach self-awareness, self-knowledge and to eventually forge his/her own sense of self and identity.

Readers must also consider the geopolitical situation in the United States, namely the geographical, economic, historical, social, cultural terrain and the racial dynamics during Baldwin’s literary career (1940s-1980s) of the north and (or versus) the south, the east and (or juxtaposed to) the west. Readers must also consider the political tensions of the civil rights era and the black power movement that shape Baldwin’s later work, militarizes, and alienates him from his once primary fan base, a white liberal audience. It is important to consider too the political climate during the milieu of the novel (1940s-1970s) and that Baldwin worked on it for five years from approximately

1974 until 1979 because these terrains show up in the novel, as well. Lastly on this point, in Wolfgang Binder’s 1980 “James Baldwin, an Interview,” Baldwin is quoted saying Just Above My Head is about history and the diaspora: “The book has something to do with the journey of a people from one place to another, a kind of diaspora which

was unrecognized as yet, and in that journey what has happened to them and what has happened to the world as a result of their journey and is still happening to the world”

(190-191). To recognize these aspects of diaspora and the Negro past and for Baldwin to write them into the history and the logic of the novel demonstrates his self-awareness and self-knowledge that enables him to define and identify himself.

To move from the concretely held definition of identity, I define “cultural identity” to situate it in a Cultural Studies framework. In Black Looks: Race and Representation, bell hooks speaks to the essence of identity: “Since decolonization as a political process is always a struggle to define ourselves in and beyond the act of resistance of domination, we are always in the process of both remembering the past even as we create new ways to imagine and make the future” (5). hooks’ quote is significant for several interconnected reasons that I wish to tease out here to reconnect them to my overall argument. First, hooks, a cultural studies scholar and black feminist theorist, is chiefly concerned with identity in her work, as is Baldwin. Though cultural studies articulates interdisciplinary theories and methodologies to critique literature, music, film, television, and other cultural production, identity is tied to ideological interpretations of all forms of cultural production. Put simply, identity informs ideology. These logics play through the practice of identity formation and cultural expression (Dimitriadis, McCarthy

181). hooks and Baldwin’s visions of identity align concerning cultural production as texts.

Second, for hooks, as is the case for Baldwin, identity is tied to the ability to

“define ourselves.” Identity and self-definition work together in a relationship of mutualism. Third, like all colonized peoples, identity is inextricably linked to the political

process of colonializing of minds and bodies as alluded to earlier, for example, in the

Transatlantic Slave Trade. Then, it follows that any attempt to decolonize one’s self must effectively address both entities: mind and body. Ideological and physical colonialism via metaphysical and physical control inform the ways in which people think and act. Colonialism imposes division where unity should have the capacity and latitude to override and commune people. Additionally, this division informs how people cognate, who similarly view their origins as familial, intertwined bloodlines. Furthermore, the dichotomy of the mind and body mirrors the significance of flesh and blood. As seen throughout this thesis so far, identity is connected to a sense of remembering the past that shapes the future.

The ability to create or define one’s self largely depends on the past, a point

Baldwin synthesizes in A Rap on Race, with Margret Meade: “We have to take the past and find out to what extent the things one carries in one’s self—the burdens we carry out of the past—cause you to do what we call the past. That burden we all carry in the present; one has to discover to what extent your apprehension of the past dictates the shape of the future” (203-204). Baldwin simultaneously links the past to the present to the future. Because we have to consider “the things one carries in one’s self” or a person’s identity (the essentialized qualities and beliefs addressed earlier) and the

“burdens we carry out of the past,” i.e., colonialism; the Transatlantic Slave Trade; diaspora; the creation of new cultural identities; the denouncing of relatives; the separation of common flesh and blood; all inform the present and the future, in the ways we can imagine to self-define and live truthfully. Stuart Hall sums up this point as well:

The past continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses us, as a simple, factual ‘past,’ since our relation to it, like the child’s relation to the

mother, is always-already ‘after the break It is always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth. Cultural identities are the points of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made, within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence but a positioning. (226)

Stuart Hall further bridges both hooks’ and extends my argument. Hall connects identity with the cultural to reconfigure how we think about identity, not only associating it as fixed to temporalities such as time or locations, as pointed to throughout this thesis so far, i.e. the African Slave trade, diaspora, colonization, etc., but also highlights a different point of view on the formation and viewing of identity:

Cultural identity…is a matter of “becoming” as well as “being.” It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history, and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere [and] have histories. But, like everything, [which] is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past, they are subject to the continuous “play” of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in a mere “recovery” of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which, when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past. (225)

It is important to note that while hooks includes the collective “ourselves” in efforts to self-define and locate one’s identity, Hall incorporates aspects of the cultural and fuses the personal and social with identity, making identity a shareable experience personally, socially, and culturally. In other words, the inclusion of the cultural reconnects or relegates identity as the personal both to/in/of a group and also outside/apart a group, as mentioned in the common definition of identity earlier.

Therefore, for Hall to locate cultural identity as belonging to “future as much as to the past,” and that “it is not something which already exists,” cultural identity can be recreated, self-defined, just as history is rediscovered, rewritten, or revised, another

idea to which I’ll return in Chapter 2. Additionally then, the emphasis on “identities as the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within…” is vital to the notion of positionality itself. Because Baldwin believed that identity is something that can be self-defined and that categories only exist to position people, Baldwin reflects a theoretical perspective. For example, here, Hall echoes the common definition of identity and Baldwin’s thoughts on identity as seen earlier. That

Baldwin engages the logics and politics of identity and self-definition years before Stuart

Hall or other cultural studies scholars suggests a reconceptualization of identity and demonstrates Baldwin’s ability to pioneer emerging academic discourses, to which the critical examination of his work contributes to disciplines and fields of study, which I contend in Chapter 3.

It is important to also notice that Hall notes the dichotomy “becoming” and “being” of cultural identity, that identity is linked both to past, fixed, historical representations and “identity as a ‘production,’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation” (222). He extends his argument for a reconceptualization of identities, to think of:

Identities as 'framed' by two axes or vectors, simultaneously operative: the vector of similarity and continuity; and the vector of difference and rupture…a dialogic relationship between these two axes. The one gives us some grounding in, some continuity with, the past. The second reminds us that what we share is precisely the experience of a profound discontinuity… Difference, therefore, persists - in and alongside continuity. (“Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 226-227)

Here again, we are reminded of the historical or the past that works with the present to construct or reconstruct identities for the future. It is also important to note the vectors of similarity and discontinuity, which systemically operate to mark sameness and difference. Insightful here is the emphasis on the two axes and that these experiences

are shared experiences as illuminated in the quote and in my thesis. That we have in common both continuity and discontinuity speaks to the notions of flesh and blood, past, present and future remembering and forgetting that I have tried to draw attention to so far. Discontinuity operates within ruptured discourse of the familial, disconnected fantasies of humanity and further underscores the division of flesh and blood, past, present, and future. Additionally, that these vectors are simultaneously operative and dialogic in relationship builds on the Baldwin’s dialectics of the familial and identity.

Because dialogue is only possible via discourse or language and only capable with two or more participating parties, Baldwin’s perspective is firmly entrenched in Hall’s theory and vice versa.

Likewise, the importance of rethinking identity in terms of the past, as Hall suggests, is a re-telling of the past to discover the “hidden histories,” or the untold stories that Baldwin recovers in his work to illuminate Hall’s assertion that: “Hidden histories have played a critical role in the emergence of many of the most important social movements of our time” (224). This is yet another important piece of Baldwin’s rhetoric that I will take up in the conclusion.

Furthermore, for all of the culturally expressive sites and vocational avenues at

Baldwin’s disposal—he was a child preacher at age 14; he held interests in acting and had relationships with Hollywood A-listers of the time, such as Marlon Brando; and he could sing—a rendition of him singing “Precious Lord” was played at his funeral in

1987—for Baldwin to choose to leave his mark socio-politically and culturally in literature is, I argue, another calculated rhetorical move that shapes his legacy. As Lynn

Orilla Scott notes, Baldwin’s oeuvre consists of: six novels, seven collections of essays,

two plays, two collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, a photo-text collaboration with Richard Avedon, two published dialogues (one with Margaret Mead, another with Nikki Giovanni), a screenplay, and a children’s story. But as Randall Kenan points out in the introduction of James Baldwin: The Cross of Redemption Uncollected

Writings, Baldwin considered himself first and foremost a novelist (xvi). I argue that

Baldwin leaves his mark in literature because of the import that literature maintains as a site of cultural production historically, sociopolitically, and culturally in the Western tradition and for the black radical tradition, as well.

Henry Louis Gates points out the importance of the production of Black literature in his seminal Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism: “The production of literature was taken to be the central arena in which persons of African descent could, or could not, establish and redefine their status within the human community. Black people, the evidence suggests, had to represent themselves as

“speaking subjects” before they could even begin to destroy their status as objects, as commodities, within western culture” (129; emphasis mine). Baldwin wrote to this end.

Likewise, Toni Morrison elucidates also the importance of such cultural production, particularly the African American novel in “Rootedness: The Ancestor as

Foundation”: “The novel is needed by African-Americans now in a way that it was not needed before...Parents don’t sit around and tell their children those classical, mythological archetypal stories that we heard years ago. But new information has got to get out, and there are several ways to do it. One is the novel. I regard it as a way to accomplish certain very strong functions” (199). The inclusion and continuity of the ancestor as foundation symbolizes the connection or, for Morrison, the rootedness,

within and into the past that shapes the present and future. Both the continuity and discontinuity of the stories and novels that shape and inform. Likewise, cultural and literary critics and theorists argue that even though storytelling and the storyteller is a lost art form (Benjamin; Barthes; Orilla Scott; Morrison) that Baldwin was endowed with the ability to tell stories. Leeming reminds us in his biography of Baldwin and Cassandra

M. Ellis underscores in “The Black Boy Looks at the Silver Screen” Baldwin’s ability to

“witness”: “Witnessing entails a process of retrospection, recuperation, and finding one’s voice…To be a witness, one must both see and linguistically perform that act of seeing.

A witness, that is, must testify. Witnessing integrates notions of the gaze with performative testimony (written or spoken words) that reifies a collective experience”

(191). Indeed, Baldwin alludes to his responsibility of witnessing several places throughout his career personally and to his characters fictitiously.

The process by which witnessing takes place, or that it is performed in retrospect, as in re-viewing the past; is a way to recuperate something lost, to define something or someone, and to find one’s voice. Thus, Baldwin’s “witnessing” embodies his perspective on a self-aware, self-knowing, self-defining identity. Readers should also value the significance on both seeing and linguistically performing the seeing, or accurately testifying to the seeing. Because Baldwin is a writer, or an artist as he grudgingly refers to himself, his responsibility to seeing and witnessing to the truth of his experience ultimately relates the individual to the collective experience. He writes in

“The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity”: “Whether I like it or not, for example, and no matter what I call myself, I suppose the only word for me, when the chips are down, is that I am an artist” (41). In the same essay Baldwin adds: “It is not your fault, it is not my fault,

that I write…for doing something that I must do…Poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us” (42). Therefore, Baldwin knows and acknowledges both his responsibility and his identity as an artist to witness to the truth about him, about the community, and about the collective experience, moreover, about us. Furthermore, the above quotes situate Baldwin in the matrix of the past, present, and future and in an individual/collective relationship of the self and the other, and contextualizes the confines in which the artist operates.

CHAPTER 2 BALDWIN’S CHARACTERS AND THE ARTIST’S BURDEN

Just Above My Head is Baldwin’s longest and most ambitious work; totaling 584 pages over five book length chapters. Several critics (Harris; Mitchell; Orilla Scott;

Nelson; Weatherby; Miller) have quite rightly observed that Baldwin rehashes, extends, and revises prior themes from his earlier works, one of the most significant Baldwin tropes, the artist-witness-narrator also found in “Sonny’s Blues,” and Another Country.

Themes also include: the power of African-American music, particularly of gospel, blues, and jazz present also in Go Tell It On the Mountain and Another Country; love and sex as transgressive agents also in Giovanni’s Room and Another Country; the hypocrisy of organized religion in Go Tell It On the Mountain, and suffering as an constitutive element to both struggle and freedom found in Go Tell It On the Mountain,

Giovanni’s Room, Another Country, Tell Me How Long The Train’s Been Gone, and If

Beale Street Could Talk. For one example, “Just above my head” is the first line of a song the character Ida Scott sings in Another Country. Baldwin’s aim in revising previous work suggests a version of “signifyin’,” or Baldwin’s personal and informal comparative literature review which undergirds the self-reflexive African American literary tradition “exceptionally conscious of its history and of the simultaneity of its canonical texts” (Gates xxiv).

Furthermore, Baldwin considers the novel the culmination of his career’s work as it marks finally his literary and literal return to Harlem since early works: Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953) and “The Harlem Ghetto,” (1955) to bring his career full circle in a sense and effectively closes a chapter in another. Baldwin’s final novel signals the completion of his long fictional career. Baldwin alludes to his metaphorical and physical

homecoming to Harlem, back to the community of family and friends with who he grew up, that he writes of in Go Tell It On the Mountain and “The Harlem Ghetto,” and transforms finally in Just Above My Head.

Discussing the novel with journalist Robert Coles in a 1977 New York Times interview called “James Baldwin Back Home,” Baldwin reveals:

I have a few more months of work on the novel. I'm going back to France in a few days, because that's where I can best finish the novel. Then, I guess, I'll be able to come home. People stop me and say: 'Coming home, Jimmie?' I say yes, soon, but I've got to go back and finish something. Maybe it'll be the end of more than the novel--a long apprenticeship, I sometimes think. (1)

Here, Baldwin also returns to an earlier refrain of a central and shared black experience, that is the lived experience of black identity and community created and maintained by suffering, which he criticized Richard Wright for lacking in Notes of a

Native Son. In Baldwin’s novel, he creates a sense and depth of community, brotherhood, and family between kin, lovers, and friends in the face of brutal dehumanizing sentimentality that simultaneously marks and diminishes “many thousands gone,” represented by Crunch, Red, and Peanut, who suffer similar fates of

Baldwin’s friends and “family,” i.e. Tony Maynard, Eugene Worth, Medger Evers,

Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Additionally, though, Baldwin presents a community of people who live without fixed boundaries and definitions, who shape shift and converge. Each character resembles another despite speaking from different perspectives, orientations (sexual and otherwise), and locations, and each reflect

Baldwin, his family and friends, prior fiction and nonfiction.

Indeed, Just Above My Head picks up where past Baldwin artist-witness- narrator-characters leave off, such as John Grimes in Go Tell It, Giovanni in Giovanni’s

Room, Ida and Rufus Scott in Another Country. Unlike his previous novels, here

Baldwin blurs the lines between eros, phileo, agape, and storge love(s) interweaving incestuous relationships between characters, notwithstanding gender and sexuality boundaries. The novel tells the story of life, love, passion, and loss in this community most often through the eyes of narrator, Hall Montana, over a 30-year period from the

1940s to the 1970s. Hall relives past experiences and recounts those of his loved ones, while he manages the career of his brother, a homosexual gospel singer turned international superstar soul crooner, Arthur Montana. Hall, the novel’s primary narrator, takes responsibility to piece together the fragments of Arthur’s shattered past, relives his brother’s and others’ memories and delivers anecdotes told to him by Julia, Jimmy,

Crunch and others. Through Hall’s eyes, vision, and witnessing throughout the novel, we see and live the interiority of each character and the horrors each experience.

Careful observation or the ability to see and acknowledge another’s experience and to realize that what one can and cannot see says something about the seer is essential to the functionality of artist-witness that Baldwin writes of.

Not just Hall though, Julia and Jimmy Miller speak for Arthur (and Baldwin) in different registers to epitomize the merging of the self and the other, to which I will return to shortly. The re-telling of Arthur’s life and the sacrifice he makes as the artist- witness serves the purpose of the “production of identity…the re-telling of the past” that bridges Stuart Hall’s argument for a rethinking of cultural identity, which Baldwin reimagines here.

It takes Hall and the other characters five years to retell the events of Arthur's 39- year life, as they provide accounts of Arthur’s experience that resonate with Baldwin's

voice and experiences as well. Hall, living up to middle class ambitions, is an embodiment of both Baldwin and his younger brother David (Leeming). Hall is happily married with two kids, has served in the Korean War, and has been employed as an advertiser and Arthur’s manager. He seems to find happiness domestically in a nuclear family life. Hall finds the domestic stability that Baldwin always searched for but could never find. However, Hall’s voice echoes Baldwin’s in many other respects, but mostly in dealing with boundaries of sexuality and race. This is most illustrated at the onset of the novel when Hall’s son, Tony, asks if the late Arthur was a “faggot”: “Arthur slept with a lot of people—mostly men, but not always. He was young, Tony. Before your mother, I slept with a lot of women…mostly women, but—Whatever the fuck your uncle was, and he was a whole lot of things, he was nobody’s faggot” (28).

Both Arthur and Hall reflect Baldwin’s vision of maneuverability between boundaries of gender and sexuality, in that both the “out” homosexual Arthur (early in the novel, Arthur tells Hall: “but I am a sissy”) and the more traditionally patriarchal and masculine Hall (“I’ve slept with a lot of women…”) argue, that: “he was nobody’s faggot.”

The quote also alludes to Baldwin’s own romantic and sexual relationships, in that he never considered himself gay or bisexual, rather that “he simply loved individuals, many of whom were men.” As Leeming reminds us, for Baldwin: “sexuality was a private matter, and he resisted the idea of being called ‘gay.’ To be ‘gay’ was to be defined— imprisoned—in still another way. Besides, he felt, words like ‘gay’ and ‘queer’ belittled the reality of love” (358). For Baldwin, love has the capacity to overtake power, to empower change, as he denotes in The Fire Next Time:

It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth. (165)

Beyond Baldwin’s definition of love, it is additionally noteworthy, that Hall draws attention to his own sexual history to clear Arthur’s name and identity is another attempt to reconcile with Arthur and see his experience. Thus, this moment between Hall and his son and Hall and Arthur, symbolizes the recognition of another’s struggles, bridges the gap between self and other. Furthermore, that Baldwin opens the novel this way indicates the importance of careful observation, vision, perspective or seeing, recognizing, and accepting one for who he is, despite gender or sexuality.

This moment also precipitates another frequent Baldwin literary device, the flashback, that he employs throughout the novel to retell the characters’ stories, “taking the reader through the experiences that led to thoughts or feelings, he brings them to an understanding of, if not belief in, the ideas” (Dixon 139), typical of Baldwin’ autobiographical fiction. Indeed, the organization of Baldwin’s essays and fiction generally follow the same pattern starting with the chronological and the spatial. He uses traditional rhetorical devices, such as: metaphor, parallelism, repetition, and

Baldwin’s characteristic autobiographical format to guide the reader from experience to idea. His works are consistently viewed as parables told from a realist perspective that connect people to their experience and to one another to provide voice. Thus, even the structure of his writing exemplifies the artist-witness.

Hall, as the first person narrator of the novel, reconstructs the past through narrative confessions and sees each character through their own story and past to deliver the message to the reader. Through Hall’s voice, we hear Arthur’s, Julia’s,

Jimmy’s and the others’ voices. The notion of confession here is important because it bridges the sense of confession as simultaneously private and public, familiar and foreign. Furthermore, confession, especially in religious contexts, reoccurs thematically throughout Baldwin’s work and in the novel at hand, as the action of laying down one’s burden at someone else’s feet, here represented as the artist-witness. Then, confession burdens the artist-witness and connects the self to the other through communion, art as an act of love.

It is confession that makes the artist’s art, that is, the song tangible, according to

Baldwin, with sorrow as the only key to joy and suffering as our bridge to one another

(Dixon). Through the song, or said another way, through suffering, one can identify the artist, simultaneously naming the artist and the song. This is how Baldwin begins to create identity, through his role as artist-witness, who delivers the experience back to the audience or community. Baldwin alludes to this effect toward the end of Just Above

My Head:

The song does not belong to the singer. The singer is found by the song. Ain’t no singer, anywhere, ever made up a song—that is not possible. He hears something. I really believe, at the bottom of my balls, baby, that something hears him, something says, come here! and jumps on him just exactly like you jump on a piano or a sax or a violin or a drum and you make it sing the song you hear: and you love it, and you take care of it, better than you take care of yourself…but you don’t have no mercy on it. You

can’t have mercy! That sound you hear, that sound you try to pitch with the utmost precision—and did you hear me? Wow!—is the sound of millions and millions and, who knows, now, listening, where life is, where is death? (576)

I want to clarify and to reiterate that while music is not my primary concern here, the music or the cultural production of the artist is what makes self-awareness, self- knowledge, and ultimately identity, possible, for, as Baldwin tells us in “The Harlem

Ghetto”: “It is simply impossible not to sing the blues, audibly or not “when the lives lived by Negroes are so inescapably harsh and stunted” (125). That is to say, that artists have the responsibility, the integrity, and the voice to actualize and stimulate self- revolution.

Thus, the re-telling of Arthur’s life, in particular, as the only openly “gay” artist- witness in the novel, tasked with delivering the experience back to the community, is contingent upon Hall’s (others’) reconciliation with his brother, mainly on Hall’s end, on account of Arthur’s homosexuality and the horrors of his life. As the central patriarchal phallocentric character in the novel, Hall must learn to face Arthur's inner world. Further, as Melvin Dixon notes in Ride Out to the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-

American Literature that Baldwin phrases Arthur’s handbills as "Hall Montana presents" to further retell or here to literally present Hall, and “the life he tells and refuses to tell”

(Dixon 139).

Through Hall’s resistance to see Arthur’s experience, in effect, Hall becomes the protagonist of the story and admits it in a late passage where Hall breaks the fourth wall and tells the reader: “It was not meant to be my story, though it is far more my story than I would have thought, or might have wished” (529). The conflation of Hall's and

Arthur's stories and experiences is Baldwin’s method of showing the reader how under appreciated and alienated the artist is in American culture. Despite allowing himself to be the vehicle that performs the work of the community, the artist is still taken advantage of and co-opted to fit another’s narrative. While the artist’s vulnerability fits

Baldwin’s beliefs of the knowledge of self and other, not seeing, experiencing, or understanding another’s perspective causes the destruction of the artist. For example, outside of Hall’s attempt to defend Arthur’s sexuality, Hall’s reservations and his inability to see and recognize his brother’s experiences as the other, the artist, the gay black male, who lives outside of definition, lead to Arthur’s death.

CHAPTER 3 A (RE)READING OF BALDWIN

Orilla Scott notes the reasons for Baldwin’s decline in the early 1970s: “reasons involve the disavowal of Baldwin by the liberal establishment, the dramatically shifting style of political resistance to racial and sexual oppressions, specifically the rise of

‘identity politics,’ and the corresponding developments in academic discourses that began to newly theorize the cultural production of racial and sexual minorities” (xiii).

While these reasons might explicate the decline of Baldwin’s work in the late 1960s-80s, current conversations on Baldwin’s work and impact, also known as the bourgeoning

“Baldwin studies” that reexamine him in the current milieu, speak to the necessity of his literature now. To consider Baldwin’s work now is to consider his relevance and poignancy and the exigency at our precise sociopolitical moment in the Obama era, the so-called post-racial society, where categorizations continue to destroy people. We should reread Baldwin precisely because of his shifting style of political resistance, because the identity politics he wrote about throughout his career are just as important now as they were then, and because the development of academic discourses that theorize the subjects he treated. Baldwin insisted that to become self-aware, knowledgeable, and finally self-defined, that we resist categorizations and identify ourselves, the ultimate achievement that may begin to lead to self-revolution.

As discussed throughout this thesis, Baldwin’s prescience and insights on identity, gender, sexuality, and race have been well documented and critically examined elsewhere. His resistance to cultural and societal norms enlightens and enables his work to be studied in different disciplines and various fields of inquiry, including feminism, gender and sexuality studies, critical race theory and more. In The Devil

Finds Work, for example, Baldwin effectively contributes to performance theory before the emergence of what it is now known as performance theory (Mitchell 37) and also to film studies with his treatise of Hollywood films from his childhood. Focusing momentarily not only on Baldwin’s novels or plays but also on his nonfiction essays that engage Black cultural production and performance, particularly blues and gospel music, photography, television, and film, Mitchell notes that, “Baldwin’s essays consistently engage the meaning-making power of performance, whether in the form of blues and gospel singing or the theatricality of everyday life” (Mitchell 34).

Likewise, in “Go Tell It on the Stage: Blues for Mister Charlie as Dialectical

Drama,” Nicholas K. Davis points out that through Baldwin's observations of political and ideological disunity laced with allusions to sexual dysfunction reiterate his overall message: that the categories-and therefore the travesties-of race, sex, class, and nation can never be cleanly partitioned. One device for conveying this insight is Baldwin's frequent trope of incest, both in the deep-historical sense of regional miscegenation and in the contemporary vectors of attraction (Davis 4; emphasis mine). Davis’ assessment links one of my prominent arguments in this thesis at the intersectionality the political and ideological disunity, and the frequent trope of incest, themes central to the plot of

Just Above My Head, which I have discussed at length. Additionally, Davis notes

Baldwin’s work in Blues for Mr. Charlie, as Baldwin’s contribution to performance studies.

Moreover, regarding performance theory, Baldwin’s views the black stage actor as vital to (the) theater, as he could be to America, because “he creates the push and pull, the give and take, between the real and imagined, Baldwin imagines as the

connection between self and other” (Mitchell 35-36; emphasis mine). To further elaborate this point, “In Baldwin’s view, the actor who can project a fictional character while remaining true to his own lived experience demonstrates the capacity to recognize the connection between self and other” (Mitchell 36). Film criticism and performance studies are two academic discourse Baldwin pioneered through prior work. Additionally,

Baldwin’s contributions to other academic discourses through scholars’ examination of his work in, for example, gender studies, where the gender bending characterizations of

Arthur in Just Above My Head, Rufus Scott in Another Country, and David and Giovanni in Giovanni’s Room, are worthwhile character studies to undertake. Obviously his work holds up for cultural studies theorists, two of which I have used to frame my thesis in bell hooks and Stuart Hall.

His work in these areas makes the densely theoretical notions he treats more accessible and easier to digest for public consumption. Baldwin’s work also provides the discourse to describe our oppression, the importance of which, he notes in “Stranger in the Village”: “the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it”

(277). Understanding that cultural production, for example his literature, provides the language of suffering that black people can use to describe, define, and empower ourselves by changing the language that seeks to control us. Baldwin’s gift to witness, as an artist, is the essence of Roland Barthes’ “writerly text,” which:

Is a perpetual present, upon which no consequent language (which would inevitably make it past) can be superimposed; the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the in- finite play of the world (the world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages. (5)

To juxtapose Baldwin in the context of the writerly text affords readers a position of control, that is, it turns the reader essentially into the writer. In other words, Baldwin’s writing allows the readers to take an active role in the interpretation of meaning for ourselves and allows us to write “in the infinity of languages.” That is, Baldwin’s work allows us, as the readers, to become transformed into the artist-witness that delivers experience back to the individual and the community, the self and the other. To read

Baldwin is to experience ourselves “writing.” Additionally, Baldwin’s work in Go Tell It

On the Mountain epitomizes the speakerly texts of Gates’ Signifying Monkey, whereas

Just Above My Head, more appropriately coincides with talking texts: “postmodern texts or black texts which ‘talk’ to other black texts” (xxiv). Baldwin’s work not only enables readers to write, but his work also talks to other texts, revises and signifies them, just as he has revised prior themes of his own canonical work, i.e. Go Tell It On the Mountain,

Giovanni’s Room, Another Country.

Finally, just as Baldwin contributed to the aforementioned established academic fields of study via the current critiques of his work, I argue that he also contributes to emerging discourses as well. As Baldwin’s career began to wind down, he adopted a pessimistic view strikingly different from his early career. With writings such as, Tell Me

How Long the Train’s Been Gone, If Beale Street Could Talk, “James Baldwin Finds the

New South is a Myth,” “Dark Days,” “Notes on the House of Bondage,” literary, rhetorical, and cultural critics might locate Baldwin in yet another discourse.

One interesting theory in which to consider Baldwin’s work in relation to is afro- pessimism. Afro-pessimism suggests a reappraisal of blackness as a cultural identity and to theorize an antagonism as opposed to a conflict. Afro-pessimist theorists argue

that violence and suffering is ontological for black positionality. Afro-pessimists perform a “work of understanding rather than that of liberation, refusing to posit seemingly untenable solutions to the problems they raise.” (Wilderson). Therefore, what if we disassociate Baldwin’s work from the cultural identity/politics conversation I and others locate him in and read him in an afro-pessimist framework? Is it possible to recover more about Baldwin and his work if we read him through an afro-pessimist lens? If so, what more can we learn about him and his legacy?

LIST OF REFERENCES

Baldwin, James. Baldwin - Collected Essays / Notes of A Native Son / Nobody Knows My Name / The Fire Next Time / No Name in the Street / The Devil Finds Work. The Library of America: New York, NY, 1998. Print.

Baldwin, James. Just Above My Head. New York: Delta Trade Paperbacks, 2000. Print.

Baldwin, James, and Randall Kenan. The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings.New York: Pantheon, 2010. Print.

Baldwin, James, and Randall Kenan. “Theater: The Negro In and Out.” The Cross ofRedemption: Uncollected Writings. New York: Pantheon, 2010. 16-23. Print.

Baldwin, James, Fred L. Standley, and Louis H. Pratt. Conversations with James Baldwin. Jackson: U of Mississippi, 1989. Print.

Barthes, R. Roland Barthes S/Z. N.p.: Hill and Wang, 1974. Print.

Braudy, Leo. “Knowing The Performer From The Performance: Fame, Celebrity, And Literary Studies.” PMLA: Publications Of The Modern Language Association Of America 126.4 (2011): 1070-1075.

Campbell, James. Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin. New York: Viking,1991. Print.

Coles, Robert J. "James Baldwin Back Home." The New York Times on the Web. The New York Times, 1998. Web. 17 July 2015.

Crawley, Ashon T. “Let's Get It On!" Performance Theory And Black Pentecostalism." Black Theology: An International Journal 6.3 (2008): 308-329.

Davis, Nicholas, K., “Go Tell It on the Stage: Blues for Mister Charlie as Dialectical Drama.” Journal of American Drama and Theatre. 2005; 17(2): 30-42.

Dixon, Melvin. Ride out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature. Urbana: U of Illinois, 1987. Print.

Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Print.

Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. 222-37.

Harris, Trudier. Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin. Knoxville: U of Tennessee, 1985. Print.

Hooks, Bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End, 1992. Print.

King, Lovalerie, and Lynn Orilla Scott. James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.

Kinnamon, Keneth. James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Print.

Leeming, David Adams. James Baldwin: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Print.

Lynch, Michael F. “Just Above My Head: James Baldwin's Quest For Belief.” Literature And Theology 11.3 (1997): 284-298. ATLA Religion Database.

Mead, Margaret, and James Baldwin. A Rap on Race. London: Corgi, 1972. Print. Miller, D. Quentin. Re-viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2000. Print.

Mitchell, Koritha. “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings The Blues For Mister Charlie.” American Quarterly 64.1 (2012): 33-60.

Nelson, Emmanuel. “James Baldwin's Vision of Otherness and Community Author(s): Expressions of Ethnic Identity. (Summer, 1983), 27-31.

Reid-Pharr, Robert. Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual.New York: New York UP, 2007. Print.

Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press. 1996. 2.

Scott, Lynn Orilla. James Baldwin's Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2002. Print.

Shin, Andrew, and Barbara Judson. “Beneath The Black Aesthetic: James Baldwin's Primer Of Black American Masculinity.” African American Review 32.2 (1998): 247- 261.

Sylvander, Carolyn Wedin. James Baldwin. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980. Print.

Weatherby, William J. James Baldwin: Artist on Fire. New York: Laurel, 1990. Print.

Wilderson, Frank B. “Incognegro, a Memoir of Exile and Apartheid.” N.p., n.d. Web.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Maurice majored in English. He spent his time studying African

American literature, graduating with a Master of Arts degree in the fall of 2015.