We turn to the critiques highlighted by Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and William Faulkner, now more than 30 years old, as we consider the limitations and possibilities of liberal discourse in the humanities. This panel queries the renewed and continuous forms of racial evasion that persist in purportedly liberal politics as well as the urgent ways in which we might complicate liberal ideals inherited from the twentieth century. How can the self-positioning of American writers of the twentieth century within liberal discourses help us to redirect, rescript, and expand critical projects of today?
The rationale for this panel lies in the stakes of ignoring the still unrealized literary and social goals outlined by Morrison and Baldwin, with an attention to what might yet be gained in an ever-changing present.
This panel connects with scholarship exemplified in Gregory S. Jay’s White Writers, Race Matters: Fictions of Racial Liberalism from Stowe to Stockett (Duke 2021); Joseph Darda’s The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism (Stanford 2021);and PMLA’s October 2020 issue on “Racial Liberalism,” edited by Charles W. Mills. We will operate according to the allotted time guidelines. Each of the four presenters will have fifteen minutes to present after a very brief general introduction of the panel. Fifteen minutes will be left at the end for discussion and questions.
Robert Jackson will begin by suggesting that Playing in the Dark (1992) is part of Morrison’s larger, career-spanning effort to account for the ongoing failure of American liberalism to recognize and acknowledge its own limitations. Jackson’s paper will consider these categories of politeness and fear—deterrents to good criticism that Morrison explains in terms of a misguided white liberalism—and her overall formulation of the problematic “liberal subject” in the process of American literary production and reception.
In a familial shift from Morrison to Baldwin’s resonant critique of well-meaning liberals, Rich Blint troubles the distance between a racially public self and privately held feelings about one’s co-citizens in a time of national contraction. Toward the middle of his landmark intervention The Fire Next Time, Baldwin recounts the too-familiar slight of being refused service. Baldwin responds to a young white man’s belated engagement: “I told him that he hadn’t wanted to talk to us earlier and we didn’t want to talk to him now.” Blint crucially relates the shared moral silence in the bar to expressions of white liberal sentiment as embodied in the contradictory moral career of Faulkner.
Continuing a critique of Faulkner, Peter Lurie repositions the author vis-à-vis Clarence Brown’s film Intruder in the Dust. Lurie demonstrates how Brown’s racial vision in the film was more closely aligned with the burgeoning Civil Rights movement than Faulkner’s own. Brown more fully realizes Faulkner’s overtly and often misguided political aims, including the book’s stilted anti-lynching rhetoric. Gavin Stevens’ narrow logic about Southern politics is highlighted by the film, furnishing a literal as well as figurative vision of a newly expanding body politic.
Finally, Amy Foley shows how Baldwin continues to challenge current discourses proliferated for white liberal readers premised on objective racial categories. In his 1976 autobiographical film criticism, The Devil Finds Work, Baldwin identifies with the gestural language of irony among select white actresses in a visual landscape dominated by white actors. Foley contends that Baldwin practices inhabiting gestures across raced and gendered lines as he reads a confidential coding of blackness in white feminine performances by Bette Davis and Sylvia Sidney.
Our panel represents a diverse range of perspectives on liberalism and race from African American literature, criticism, and film with different emphases on politics, race, the body, performance, and media. The participants are non-tenured, visiting, and tenured faculty. We each differ in our embodied, psychic, and epistemological orientations and in our relations with the social world. Our diverse critical methods and approaches are extensions of our varied critical concerns.