The writing that James Baldwin produced after the 1960s is marked by the recognition of political defeat and his reckoning with social decay. What is often referred to as Baldwin’s late-career bitterness, however, should be measured against the intensity of hope. Though tested and beat down, Baldwin never abandoned hope as he sought new forms of engagement, new agencies, and bold new efforts at emancipation. While scholars and critics have contrasting accounts for his formal evolution after the 1960s, there is no doubt that a change occurred in his writing at a deep, intimate, even erotic level, a change that has only recently begun to be studied with the same care and attention shown to his earlier works.

This panel will consider the ways in which the late Baldwin wrote of breakdown as breakthrough, how he tried to understand decay as necessary to emancipation. Panelists will each present papers of 15 minutes, followed by discussion with the audience. Justin A. Joyce, founding co-editor of James Baldwin Review, will chair the panel and moderate participation with the audience.

Sonia Mae Brown traces a theory of erotic power as ethical submission across several late works including the novels If Beale Street Could Talk and Just Above My Head. Brown argues that the late works of James Baldwin articulate a theory of erotic power grounded not in domination alone, but in ethical submission: an intentional yielding that makes possible new forms of relationality, accountability, and care. In Baldwin’s late archive, for Brown, submission is neither passivity nor defeat; rather, it is a disciplined, often risky openness that resists the coercive logics of racial capitalism and state violence. His characters and narrators model forms of surrender that are chosen rather than imposed, revealing how erotic life can become a site of political resistance and ethical formation. By placing Baldwin in conversation with contemporary discourses on kink, consent, and power, Brown positions his late work as a critical resource for reimagining leadership, intimacy, and freedom.

Hyunsoo Kim finds Baldwin figuring intimacy as the dissolution of restrictive subjectivity in the novel Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone. Scholarship on this novel has often emphasized Baldwin’s critique of how Black subjectivity is mimetically produced in opposition to white male subjectivity. This presentation shifts attention from that to argue that Baldwin reimagines intimacy as a destabilizing, ego-dissolving encounter. For Kim, Baldwin’s conception of intimacy resonates with Luce Irigaray’s notion of the “mucous” as an ever-interchanging medium in which neither subject possesses the other, but each emerges as a reflected reflection of the other. Thus, against conventional models of love as identification or mastery, Kim argues that Baldwin figures intimacy as a shattering force that exposes the subject’s constitutive dependency, anticipating an ethics grounded in vulnerability, opacity, and the dissolution of sovereignty.

Yuma Morooka sees the coming apart of a community in mourning as the mourning of a community divided by class and post-civil rights defeat in The Evidence of Things Not Seen. Although the concept of Black mourning can illuminate the continuity between the present and the past in terms of antiblackness both in the U.S. and abroad, it often fails to attend to specific socio-political conditions that paradoxically enable it to be transhistorical. This eclipse must be fulfilled because Black mourning itself could be lost under certain circumstances. Morooka reads James Baldwin’s final book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), as an attempt to examine post-civil rights settings under which a Black community became disintegrated and unable to mourn children killed in the Atlanta Child Murders from 1979 to 1981. In other words, Evidence, for Morooka, practices post-civil rights mourning by lamenting the loss of Black mourning.

This session includes a diverse mix of racial and gendered voices, including participants from four different institutions and graduate students.