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This excerpt from James Baldwin: Living in Fire details a key juncture in Baldwin’s life, 1957–59, when he was transformed by a visit to the South to write about the civil rights movement while grappling with the meaning of the Algerian Revolution. The excerpt shows Baldwin understanding black and Arab liberation struggles as simultaneous and parallel moments in the rise of Third World, anti-colonial and anti-racist U.S. politics. It also shows Baldwin’s emotional and psychological vulnerability to repressive state violence experienced by black and Arab citizens in the U.S., France, and Algiers.
The 1965 debate at Cambridge University between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, Jr., posed the question: “Has the American Dream been achieved at the Expense of the American Negro?” Within the contours of the debate, Baldwin and Buckley wrestled with the ghosts of settler colonialism and slavery in a nation founded on freedom and equality. Framing the debate within the longue durée, this essay examines the deep cultural currents related to the American racial paradox at the height of the Civil Rights movement. Underscoring the changing language of white resistance against black civil rights, the essay argues that the Baldwin and Buckley debate anticipated the ways the U.S. would address racial inequality in the aftermath of the civil rights era and the dawn of neoliberalism in the 1970s.
This essay reviews Hilton Als’ 2019 exhibition God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin at the David Zwirner Gallery. The show visually displays Baldwin in two parts: “A Walker in the City” examines his biography and “Colonialism” examines “what Baldwin himself was unable to do” by displaying the work of contemporary artists and filmmakers whose works resonate with Baldwin’s critiques of masculinity, race, and American empire. Mirakhor explores how Als’ quest to restore Baldwin is part of a long and deep literary and personal conversation that Als has been having since he was in his teens, and in this instance, exploring why and how it has culminated via the visual, instead of the literary. As Mirakhor observes, to be in the exhibit is not to just observe how Als has formed and figured Baldwin, but to see how Baldwin has informed and made Als, one of our most lyrical and impassioned contemporary writers and thinkers.
Francis Bacon produced his final draft of the New Atlantis around the years 1624-1625. Standing at the threshold of early modern thought, Bacon's text operates at the interstices of its contemporary culture and does indeed signal a desire to 'illuminate all the border-regions that confine upon the circle of our present knowledge'. This book presents a collection of essays that show how the New Atlantis negotiates a variety of contexts, namely literary, philosophical, political, religious and social, in order to achieve this. The narrative begins with a standard literary device. When Bacon wrote the New Atlantis, he clearly had More's Utopia in mind as a model. For all his strictures on the use of language for rhetorical effect, Francis Bacon was thoroughly grounded in the Renaissance art of rhetoric. He consciously drew on his rhetorical skill in his writings, adapting his style as occasion demanded. The New Atlantis is a text about natural philosophy which seems to offer connections at almost every point with moral and political philosophy. The book discusses two forms of natural knowledge that Bacon takes up and develops in the New Atlantis: natural magic, and medicine. The modern project is crucially dependent on two fundamental miracles: the miracle of creation and the miracle of divine revelation. The book also analyses Bacon's representations of colonialism and Jewishness in the New Atlantis has revealed. The New Atlantis raises questions concerning the relationship between censorship and knowledge.
Colonialism, Jewishness and politics 129 7 ‘Books will speak plain’? Colonialism, Jewishness and politics in Bacon’s New Atlantis CLAIRE JOWITT Francis Bacon’s Of Counsel (1625) asserts that ‘Books will speak plain when counsellors blanch.’1 In other words, a counsellor – even one like Bacon, languishing on the margins of political favour – will find it easier to offer advice to his prince through the medium of the written word. A counsellor can give better advice away from the intimidating presence of his monarch. Bacon’s statement in Of Counsel provides a
the ‘Oriental’ female compared to those of the male, as well as with the genital size and sexual prowess of African men.8 He quite explicitly exhibits the other as sexual body. In early nineteenth-century exhibitions of Saartjie Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus’ – like Margaret Cadmore, a Southern African extreme other – the fleshy, ‘animal’ black was represented to the eyes of Europe as a single female body. It was evidence as concrete as it was possible to obtain of the implacable physicality of the other woman.9 Under colonialism such representations of course
resist the compounded oppressions of colonialism, gender, race, class, sexuality, etc., and find at the same time that tactics of self-representation are often usefully adopted from the more established and yet compromising nationalist politics of their male counterparts. Indeed, as Kumari Jayawardena has shown, antiimperial, nationalist struggles in many parts of the world historically gave birth to (usually middle-class) feminist movements.14 Yet, even so, the exclusions imposed on women by the independent nation, especially by those nationalist brothers concerned to
cringe, ‘[the] Wales of stereotypes, leeks, daffodils, look-younow-boyo rugby supporters singing Max Boyce songs in three-part harmony while phoning Mam to tell her they’ll be home for tea and Welsh cakes’ (1997) is one whose demise he would welcome. Norquay_09_Ch8 138 22/3/02, 10:04 am 139 The plays of Ed Thomas Negative or disempowering stereotypes are an integral part of political and cultural colonialism. While efforts to locate Wales within any post-colonial paradigm inevitably looks strained owing to the fact that the undeniable colonisation ‘happened seven
, 1996), pp. 178, and 149–50. For their comments on postcolonialism’s neocolonial complicities, see also: Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 245–58, and Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (New York and London: Verso, 1997), pp. 3–4, 17–21, 185–203. 33 This is the kind of material that is almost too knowingly satirised in Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2002), especially the second part, ‘Rukhsana’. 34 See Aijaz Ahmad’s remarkable ‘rave’ review of Roy’s ‘overwritten
Marxist critic Aijaz Ahmad argues that imperialism and its late capitalist logic cannot be resisted by recourse to a fatally derivative nationalism, but by means of a rejuvenated post-Soviet socialism (1992: 287–318). Colonialism’s other, however, was never merely nationalism and/or socialism, but a spatial imagination which it had to reconfigure in its own controlling terms. Its ally in this ideological task was an historicism which naturalised colonialism’s own way of seeing and which blocked oppositional discourses. But a backwards glance at the cultural history of