Social domination, as exerted and felt through the categories of race, class, sex, and gender, finds itself expressed unevenly in literature and other cultural forms, subject to the peculiarities of their historical moments. In a political, social, and economic moment beset by attacks on these categories, and a revisionist political movement that seeks to deny the historical realities of the impacts of structures of domination, a nuanced examination of these literary expressions and their relationships to and in the world is more urgent than ever.

This session of three fifteen-minute papers, convened by James Baldwin Review and chaired by the journal's founding co-editor Justin A. Joyce, will examine this relation between history and literature through the work of James Baldwin. The session incorporates a diversity of voices by including a graduate student and early career assistant professors from both the US and Canada.

Ronnel Keith Berry, in his presentation--Racial Capitalism and the (Un)Knowing US Whiteness in James Baldwin’s Another Country-- argues that Baldwin’s critique of racial capitalism not only exploits Blackness but also alienates white subjects, showing how economic and racial structures stifle intimate connections and foreclose genuine intimacy by focusing on marriages in Another Country and Giovanni’s Room.

Rohan Ghatage's presentation--“Our identities... are being altered”: James Baldwin and the Neoliberalization of Racial Capitalism--will consider how Baldwin’s long essay The Evidence of Things Not Seen traces the rise of neoliberalism marked by two interrelated features: the relentless commodification of all things and the reorganization of psychic and social life around consumerism.

Grace Murry's talk--Black Madness in Another Country--reads the novel Another Country through the lens of disability and asks what are the possibilities, according to Baldwin, for mad Black people to be at home in a world structured by racial capitalism.