Literature

James Baldwin: America and Beyond by Bill Schwarz and Cora Kaplan, editors

James Baldwin: America and Beyond

Bill Schwarz and Cora Kaplan, editors

Rights: World
For more info, contact Mary Bisbee-Beek at bisbeeb@umich.edu

James Baldwin was one of the twentieth century's boldest writers who spent a lifetime seeking to illuminate the psychic and emotional operations of social power. America and Beyond brings alive the points of contention in Baldwin's life and writing in order to think them through for the present.

Through a variety of forms—novels, essays, plays, speeches—Baldwin determined to uncover the meanings of America ('an extremely controversial proper noun') through explorations of his own life as an American. His was a journey full of dazzling paradoxes and insights. At every point he worked to undermine dogmatism and dichotomy. Yet it is common for those who have followed after to establish a divide between his art and his politics; his fiction and his essays; between American Baldwin and European Baldwin; between black Baldwin and queer Baldwin. This book endeavors to bring Baldwin back into a single figure: discordant and elusive, but at the same time a figure of magical power.

This interdisciplinary collection, by leading writers in their fields, brings together a discussion of the many facets of Baldwin the writer and Baldwin the prophetic conscience of the nation. The core of the volume addresses the shifting, complex relations between Baldwin as an American—'as American as any Texas GI' as he once wryly put it—and his life as an itinerant cosmopolitan. His ambivalent imaginings of America were always mediated by his conception of a world 'beyond' America: a world he knew both from his travels, and from his voracious reading. He was a man whose instincts were, at every turn, nurtured by America; but who at the same time developed a ferocious critique of American exceptionalism. In seeking to understand how, as an American, he could learn to live with difference—breaking the power of fundamentalisms of all stripes—he opened an urgent, timely debate which is still ours. His America was an idea fired by desire and grief in equal measure. As the authors assembled here argue, to read him now allows us to imagine new possibilities for the future.

Cora Kaplan is Visiting Professor, School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London and Emerita Professor of English, University of Southampton. She is the author of several books and edited volumes, most recently Victoriana-Histories, Fictions, Criticism (Columbia University Press, 2007). A feminist critic and theorist, with a special interest in class and race, her work has focused on questions of aesthetic and politics.

Bill Schwarz is Reader In Postcolonial History and Director of Graduate Studies for the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London. He has been a Visiting Professor at University of Michigan. His research focuses on postcolonial history, with particular emphasis on the end of the British Empire. He has edited or co-edited seven books and is editor of Memories of Empire Vol. III forthcoming from Oxford in 2009, and co-editor with Stuart Hall of Conversations with Stuart Hall from Polity, Cambridge, 2009.

Fall 2010
300 pages