These talks illuminate distinctive paths through which James Baldwin interrogated the emancipation narratives of US social life in the twentieth century. Forgoing conventional narrative prose forms—short story, novel, essay, etc.—Baldwin pursued conceptual and ethical considerations of freedom through engagements with film, theater, poetry, geography, and music. These scenes of incipient, potential, and brutally deferred freedom across media, language, and genre constitute intimations of emancipation within Baldwin’s ethical vision.
This panel seeks to open a wider conversation regarding the urgency of Baldwin’s voice for the present moment, when emancipatory possibilities seem as remote as at any time in memory. Times of crisis send many of us back to Baldwin’s work, and these innovative talks seek to generate collaborative dialogue regarding Baldwin’s conceptual approaches to emancipatory narratives.
A key text in this session’s conversation is Baldwin’s overlooked 1976 work of visual cultural analysis, The Devil Finds Work. His only extended instance of film criticism opens up a much more consequential metaanalysis of the psychic racialization of image-cultures. It also offers ways to prioritize Baldwin’s consistent weakening of genre boundaries. The references to film, theater, and music throughout Baldwin’s fiction and essays can be connected through his socio-cultural analysis of film, race, gender, and sexuality in Devil Finds Work. A parallel engagement with Baldwin’s anti-colonial thought in his poetry and late, unpublished prose, particularly his late manuscript, No Papers for Muhammad, runs through the session’s talks, as Baldwin seeks an emancipatory pathway out of the Euro-American imperial modernity configured by anti-migrant, anti-Arab racism.
Kate Edwards theorizes Baldwin’s ethical antinormativity as offering an anticipatory critique of the 21st-century political left by considering Avgi Saketopoulou’s emergent theory of “exigent sadism.” Reading Baldwin’s political theory as resisting calls for the self-sacrifices of allies and the vulnerable, Edwards identifies the potentiality of future radical freedom in Baldwin’s ethics. Where other philosophical approaches to coalitional practice prioritize compromised visions, Edwards argues Baldwin envisions a liberatory embeddedness of self and other in his 1970s works, culminating in the unmatchable closing paragraphs of The Devil Finds Work (1976), three essays that comment on (a prototypical, unnamed) exigent sadism within contemporary liberal filmography. Baldwin’s text identifies the films as limit-cases, the horizon beyond which ethical embeddedness begins.
Peter W. Brown finds in The Devil Finds Work Baldwin’s ongoing effort, from the 1960s to the end of his life, to narrativize the psychic realm of inequality and injustice. As David Kurnick has argued, Baldwin’s novels do not actually achieve the goal of reconciling interiority and collective desire; rather, his narratives “strain toward” collectivity and thus leave behind a “painful gulf... between the psychological and the political.” Brown argues, in light of The Devil Finds Work, that the theatre for Baldwin is not so much a stand-in for the collective against the interiorizing drive of the novel as it is a set of techniques and material conditions for making palpable “the tension between the real and the imaginary.” Rather than a “gulf,” the theatre offers Baldwin an enabling “tension” that formally instantiates a confrontation between bodies: “flesh and blood... challenged by flesh and blood.” Paradoxically, film for Baldwin is the medium of interiority.
Kim Fortuny draws on research since the early 2000s at Bogazici University (formerly Robert College) in Istanbul, one of Baldwin’s centers of gravity while he was in and out of the city in the 1960s and early 70s. Fortuny’s talk considers the emancipatory potential carrying over into Baldwin’s later years from his time living in Turkey. Although he did not return to Istanbul once resettling in St. Paul-de-Vence, his unfinished, late manuscript, “No Papers for Muhammed,” explores his ongoing engagement with anti-colonial thought regarding Arab migrants in Europe and the liminal space of Turkey as an exilic vantage point. Fortuny also discusses Baldwin’s poetry in the volume Jimmy’s Blues as similarly complicating the notion of return. While many prose writers turn or return to poetry late in life, Baldwin’s poetry pursues an aesthetic of generative non-return, a non-western “exile” that hints as emancipatory possibilities yet to take shape even in words.