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This article examines James Baldwin’s late text The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985) as one of his substantial attempts at “forging a new language,” which he tentatively mentions in his late essays and interviews. As an unpopular and difficult text in Baldwin’s oeuvre, Evidence carries the imprint of a new economy of time, casting the past into the present, and a new economy of space, navigating across other geographies in appraising the serial killings of children in one of Atlanta’s poorest Black neighborhoods. This article suggests that a new economy of time emerges earlier in No Name in the Street (1972), as a result of Baldwin’s self-imposed exile in Europe. The article then analyzes his spatiotemporal logic in the specifics of Evidence with reference to a Black middle class, urbanization, the ghetto, gentrification, and other colonized spaces.
Based on a recent, archival discovery of the script, “But Amen is the Price” is the first substantive writing about James Baldwin’s collaboration with Ray Charles, Cicely Tyson, and others in a performance of musical and dramatic pieces. Titled by Baldwin, “The Hallelujah Chorus” was performed in two shows at Carnegie Hall in New York City on 1 July 1973. The essay explores how the script and presentation of the material, at least in Baldwin’s mind, represented a call for people to more fully involve themselves in their own and in each other’s lives. In lyrical interludes and dramatic excerpts from his classic work, “Sonny’s Blues,” Baldwin addressed divisions between neighbors, brothers, and strangers, as well as people’s dissociations from themselves in contemporary American life. In solo and ensemble songs, both instrumental and vocal, Ray Charles’s music evinced an alternative to the tradition of Americans’ evasion of each other. Charles’s sound meant to signify the history and possibility of people’s attainment of presence in intimate, social, and political venues of experience. After situating the performance in Baldwin’s personal life and public worldview at the time and detailing the structure and content of the performance itself, “But Amen is the Price” discusses the largely negative critical response as a symptom faced by much of Baldwin’s other work during the era, responses that attempted to guard “aesthetics” generally—be they literary, dramatic, or musical—as class-blind, race-neutral, and apolitical. The essay presents “The Hallelujah Chorus” as a key moment in Baldwin’s search for a musical/literary form, a way to address, as he put it, “the person and the people,” in open contention with the social and political pressures of the time.
This collection and the romances it investigates are crucial to our understanding of the aesthetics of medieval narrative and to the ideologies of gender and sexuality, race, religion, political formations, social class, ethics, morality and national identity with which those narratives emerge.
This book addresses the special relationship from the perspective of post-Second World War British governments. It argues that Britain's foreign policy challenges the dominant idea that its power has been waning and that it sees itself as the junior partner to the hegemonic US. The book also shows how at moments of international crisis successive British governments have attempted to re-play the same foreign policy role within the special relationship. It discusses the power of a profoundly antagonistic relationship between Mark Twain and Walter Scott. The book demonstrates Stowe's mis-reading and mis-representation of the Highland Clearances. It explains how Our Nig, the work of a Northern free black, also provides a working-class portrait of New England farm life, removed from the frontier that dominates accounts of American agrarian life. Telegraphy - which transformed transatlantic relations in the middle of the century- was used by spiritualists as a metaphor for the ways in which communications from the other world could be understood. The story of the Bolton Whitman Fellowship is discussed. Beside Sarah Orne Jewett's desk was a small copy of the well-known Raeburn portrait of Sir Walter Scott. Henry James and George Eliot shared a transatlantic literary network which embodied an easy flow of mutual interest and appreciation between their two milieux. In her autobiography, Gertrude Stein assigns to her lifelong companion the repeated comment that she has met three geniuses in her life: Stein, Picasso, and Alfred North Whitehead.
? One of the challenges of this collection is to read Beowulf in a more personal way. Although I had not given it much thought before, this challenge made me wonder whether my own working-class background might lie behind my love for the artefactual. I am a first-generation scholar, the first in my family to attend university, let alone pursue postgraduate studies. The norm was for men to leave school at sixteen (or younger) and find a trade, which they would remain in for the rest of their lives. My entry into middle-class academia might be viewed as a ‘success
situate the colony in relation to Australia, the United States, and Great Britain, specifically in racialised terms. Our chapter begins with an overview of Australia’s late-century labour crisis, which precipitated Lane’s migration scheme. We turn then to the Cosme Monthly and its complex negotiations of race and class via poetry and song. Australian labour and the vision of Paraguay William Lane was an English-born immigrant to Australia, arriving in Brisbane in 1885. Among the few possessions he brought with him to the southern hemisphere were copies of Marx
purpose is not to gainsay these perspectives, but to identify, complementarily, how Our Nig, the work of a Northern free black, also provides a working-class portrait of New England farm life, removed from the frontier that dominates accounts of American agrarian life.3 The novel articulates a young female farm servant’s class position and lack of agency.4 Consequently its engagement with the pastoral is highly original – an originality promoted by Wilson’s AfricanAmerican identity: the pastoral tradition to hand was a white Western one, from which she was largely
determination and their immediate needs – money. Still, the salary they offered seemed to me then enormous. I had my son to educate, and I have always had an irresistible urge to try my hand at any new job which offered itself, just to see if I could do it, so I signed the contract, hastily put together an act and bought some dresses. (Constanduros, 1946: 50) The pressing financial need is, of course, accounted for in the seemingly unavoidable expenditure for a middle-class parent – the fees for her son’s schooling at preparatory and public school. There is also though the
actual concerns of the landowning class of the time – property, fences, hunting rights, being just to one’s tenants, seeking proper legal redress for wrongs, and eventually, after much harm done, compromise and reconciliation’.2 MUP_McDonald_05_Ch4 82 11/20/03, 13:57 Sir Degrevant 83 While agreeing with Davenport’s desire to place the narrative in a knowable historical context, I think he defines the audience and its ‘actual concerns’ too narrowly. Without disputing the justice of his formulation, I would argue that the very term landowning class, however accurate
affective and biological labour and situating the notion of motherhood in a larger context of issues of reproductive work, the series offers a rich and complex reflection on the current debate about the global division of reproductive work across axes of gender, race, nationality, migration status, and class (Colen, 1995; Ginsburg and Rapp, 1995; Parreñas, 2000; Shanley, 2001; Vora, 2008; Yngvesson, 2010). However, while critics have recognised motherhood, misogyny, sexism, and gendered violence as central themes in China Girl, surprisingly few comments address the racial