In “Thoughts on Late Style,” Edward Said describes how an artist’s late works, “cannot be reconciled or resolved, since their irresolution and fragmentariness are constitutive, neither ornamental nor symbolic of something else.” The late works of novelist and essayist James Baldwin have often been dismissed as evidence of decadence, of their maker’s exhaustion after too many years of 1960s activism, as a crude failure to synthesize his fiction and nonfiction, the novels too political, the essays too aesthetic. Yet this supposedly weak synthesis rhymes with Said’s meditations on the irresolution typical of an artist’s late works.

In reading Baldwin’s late style as creative, emancipatory risk taking, panelists for this session will sketch the contours of what might constitute Baldwin’s late style, and how his formal experimentation took risks to attempt novel modes of agency. Panelists will each present papers of 15 minutes, followed by discussion with the audience. Kyle Proehl, editorial assistant of James Baldwin Review, will chair the panel and moderate participation with the audience.

J. Ken Stuckey will discuss the twinned, contrasting themes of fame as betrayal and fame as beacon of hope in Baldwin’s book on cinema, The Devil Finds Work. Baldwin’s public comments suggest that he regarded the move from poverty to fame as a trading of one form of insecurity for another. For Stuckey, fame surfaces in still subtler ways in Baldwin’s nonfiction. Even within one late text, The Devil Finds Work, Baldwin toggles between two strangely discursive positions. The first is the young Jimmy, who receives oppressive ideologies from his father but a seemingly liberatory one through identification with Bette Davis on the silver screen as a radical representation of beauty. But the second position that Baldwin constructs in the same text is as an accomplished artist with a platform afforded to him by his celebrity, a status that he fears can be co-opted by the media industry. In scenarios involving this version of Baldwin, he is perpetually scrutinizing the potential for fame as a betrayal instead of the beacon of hope. These conflicting depictions, Stuckey argues, are especially acute late in Baldwin’s career.

In her reading of No Name in the Street, Ariel Martino locates a series of anti-linear gestures that refuse the illusion of political progress by returning to moments of rupture. Critics, scholars, and pundits frequently cast James Baldwin as the prophet of our “unprecedented” times, as if confronting history in precisely the way that Baldwin asks us to might build a bright, new America. While satisfying in its parallelism, this application of past to present ultimately obscures the affect of defeat that hangs over Baldwin’s later work. Martino focuses on Baldwin’s 1972 memoir-manifesto No Name In the Street as the exemplification of his feelings of resignation after a series of assassinations that signal the failure of the Civil Rights Movement. For Martino, this resignation and reexamination proceeds through many anti-linear gestures that refuse the possibility of political progress and return again and again to a moment of rupture. The question at stake for Baldwin in No Name in the Street seems to be whether he could have responded to this call to arms differently and if that might have changed everything.

Frank Leon Roberts proposes we read Baldwin’s final, unfinished play, The Welcome Table, as his most radical work. Roberts centers James Baldwin’s final, unfinished play The Welcome Table as a culminating expression of “fugitive stagecraft”: a minoritarian aesthetic practice defined by formalistic disruption, conceptual opacity, and political refusal. Long dismissed as fragmentary or incomplete, The Welcome Table is here reinterpreted as Baldwin’s most radical work: a play of fugitive last words that refuses narrative resolution or legacy. Through its recursive structure, spectral ensemble, and suspended affect, the play exemplifies Baldwin’s late style, engaging themes of erotic opacity, diva fatigue, queer mourning, and archival disobedience. Drawing on contemporary debates in queer of color critique and performance studies, this talk argues that Baldwin’s final theatrical gesture was not to conclude, but rather to disappear.

This session includes a diverse mix of racial and gendered voices with representatives from four distinct institutions.