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This essay reads James Baldwin in conversation with two unexpected interlocutors from the American nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Ralph Waldo Emerson and W. E. B. Du Bois. What draws these historically distant and intellectually different thinkers together, their differences making their convergences all the more resonant and provocative, is a shared mode of attention they bring to the social crises of their eras. It is a mode of attention foregrounding how the often unobserved particulars and emotional registers of human life vitally shape civic existence; more specifically, a mode of attention provoking us to see how “a larger, juster, and fuller future,” in Du Bois’s words, is a matter of the ordinary intimacies and estrangements in which we exist, human connections in all their expressions and suppressions. Emerson names them “facts [. . .] harder to read.” They are “the finer manifestations,” in Du Bois’s terms, “of social life, which history can but mention and which statistics can not count”; “All these things,” Baldwin says, “[. . .] which no chart can tell us.” In effect, from the 1830s to the 1980s these thinkers bear witness to what politics, legislation, and even all our knowledges can address only partially, and to the potentially transformative compensations we might realize in the way we conduct our daily lives. The immediate relevance and urgency this essay finds in their work exists not in proposed political actions, programs for reform, or systematic theories of social justice but in the way their words revitalize the ethical question “How shall I live?” Accumulative and suggestive rather than systematically comparative or polemical, this essay attempts to engage with Emerson, Du Bois, and Baldwin intimately, to proceed in the spirit of their commitment to questioning received disciplines, languages, and ways of inhabiting the world.
This essay analyzes how James Baldwin’s late novel If Beale Street Could Talk represents Black women’s care work in the face of social death as an example of how Black women act as surrogates for Black liberation giving birth to a new world and possibilities of freedom for Black (male) people. Within the politics of Black nationalism, Black women were affective workers playing a vital role in the (re)creation of heteronormative family structures that formed the basis of Black liberation cohered by a belief in the power of patriarchy to make way for communal freedom. This essay demonstrates how Beale Street’s imagining of freedom centers not on what Black women do to support themselves or each other, but on the needs of the community at large, with embodied sacrifice as a presumed condition of such liberation.
This essay explores Black queer feminist readings of the sexual politics of James Baldwin’s Another Country. Recent work at the intersection of queer of color critique and Black feminism allows us to newly appreciate Baldwin’s prescient theorization of the workings of racialized and gendered power within the erotic. Previous interpretations of Another Country have focused on what is perceived as a liberal idealization of white gay male intimacy. I argue that this approach requires a selective reading of the novel that occludes its more complex portrayal of a web of racially fraught, power-stricken, and often violent sexual relationships. When we de-prioritize white gay male eroticism and pursue analyses of a broader range of erotic scenes, a different vision of Baldwin’s sexual imaginary emerges. I argue that far from idealizing, Another Country presents sex within a racist, homophobic, and sexist world to be a messy terrain of pleasure, pain, and political urgency. An unsettling vision, to be sure, but one that, if we as readers are to seek more equitable erotic imaginaries, must be reckoned with.
becomes an end in itself, a goal of self-fashioning for ongoing retrospection. Such a degree of mnemonic arrest produces a melancholic culture in which progress is marked by the increase of intimacy with the past: whole libraries available through a home terminal; lives video-graphed from birth through toddlerhood, graduations through sexual encounters, surgeries through testaments. Rather than Benjamin
can still be considered an ethnographic film masterpiece, communicating, with an unprecedented intimacy and sympathy for the principal characters, a powerful understanding of the range of skills that Ju/’hoansi hunters must have possessed at that time and of the difficulties that they must have had to overcome in hunting large game animals with their minimal technology, in such a challenging natural environment. A record that is also a movie: the event-sequence method Whatever its merits or deficiencies, in making
, not only does she take up the Princess’s place in the pixelated frame, she also experiences the involuntary intimacy of a much less formal relation of regard, that of celebrity culture. She is, she proclaims, ‘speaking as your Queen’, but in Campbell’s added phrase she continues, ‘ and as a grandmother ’, asserting her familial communality with the people she ‘personates’. Mass mediation is
generated the concept of the live, broadcast media must compensate for its lack, by offering intimacy, apparent proximity and equality of access. Media events ‘institutionalize a cinematographic model of “publicness”’, 40 a characteristic emphasised by the emergence of public screenings. With electronic communication
subsistence practices, mostly hunting and fishing, as well as in some domestic routines, as they seek to wrest a living from the challenging Arctic environment. In doing so, Nanook offered a degree of intimacy with the subjects coupled with a technical mastery of the medium that had not been previously achieved in any form of non-fiction film-making. By a thought-provoking coincidence, Nanook was released in the same year that Bronislaw Malinowski
feminist/lesbian union between its two protagonists, only to develop into one that sees their increasing closeness homophobically. 17 To put it the way B. Ruby Rich did when comparing Persona unfavourably to Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform (1931), ‘the loss of individual identity is a threat that haunts women’s intimacy like a destructive specter: getting too close to another woman’, ultimately, ‘means losing oneself’. 18 Put simply, the self/other distinction is anchored to sexual difference; without it
signifies the dawning of a new kind of fathering that differs from the patriarchal norm, that offers intimacy and involvement beyond that pattern strictly in place in the post-war years when demobilisation dictated the reinforcement of the gender roles so heavily disrupted by World War II. Ultimately this is the story of an innocent child’s first brush with human fallibility – sin, of a kind. Brande makes