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Baldwin wrote about the systematic and institutional perils as well as real life traumas, during the Atlanta missing children episode of the 1980s. His work could be snatched from today's headlines given the lack of recognition that "Black Lives Matter." I content in revisiting Baldwin's work and life we gain a foundation for dealing and further exposing today's issues.
Film Quarterly, 2017
Thirty years after James Baldwin's untimely death at the age of 63, Haitian-born Raoul Peck makes good on Baldwin's spirited prophecy through his timely and intrepidly titled I Am Not Your Negro (2016). In his rendezvous with Baldwin, Peck carries Baldwin's prescient voice into the twenty-first century, where his rhetorical practice of “telling it like it is” resonates anew in this perilous political moment. Drawing on his signature practice of reanimating the archive through bricolage, Peck not only represents but also remobilizes Baldwin's image repertoire, helping to conjugate the very idea of this revered—and often criticized—novelist and essayist to renewed effect. Like audiences of an earlier era, today's viewers become spellbound by this critical witness's fervent idiomatic eloquence and uncompromising vision. Crichlow argues that Baldwin's journey is palpably not over—perhaps just beginning. The film makes certain his illuminating prose and penetr...
The Black Scholar, 2019
African American Review, 2020
represent the unspeakable as they respond to the Atlanta child murders of 1979-81. In the tradition of formally innovative writers who created the slave narrative, the lynching play, Blues poetry, and Black Arts orthography, Baldwin, Bambara, and Jones use specific textual strategies including listing, excess, reportage, incantation, and shifting point of view and voice to narrate-and to show the impossibility of narrating-racist violence. Their writings about the Atlanta child murders exemplify the ways in which African American literature since the civil rights movement refuses to offer a linear narrative of increasing racial justice in the United States or a promise of healing from past injustice. 1 Contemporary African American literature grapples with ongoing racist violence, especially highly visible and culturally definitive moments, such as the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia in 1985 and the brutal police beating of Rodney King in 1991. The simultaneous need to represent and the impossibility of representing such incidents becomes even more sharp when the victims are children, as in the 16 th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham in 1963 and the Atlanta child murders. In the face of these events, African American writers across genres wrestle with sometimes competing impulses to correct the archive, offer solace, and suggest ways of both living with and resisting violence against Black people. Evidence, Those Bones, and Leaving Atlanta are part of the "articulation of collective racial grief " that Aida Levy-Hussen describes as grieving not only "the unresolved trauma of the slave past" but also "the political, civic, and psychic dismantling of the modern Civil Rights Movement" (11). Baldwin, Bambara, and Jones write works that mourn the children of Atlanta and the unfulfilled promises of safety and justice held out by the civil rights movement. None offers resolution; as one character in Jones's novel says, "They could be killing kids forever!" (225). Octavia, the fifth grader who speaks these words, is right in the broadest sense: The deaths in Atlanta are one chapter in a story of violence against Black children that continues today. Evidence, Those Bones, and Leaving Atlanta struggle to represent the untellable: Baldwin writes a jeremiad of mourning and exhortation; Bambara uses shifts in person, point of view, and temporality to refuse the consolation of narrative or resolution; and Jones uses children's points of view to represent terror as the everyday backdrop of their lives.
Words Left Unspoken in the Lives of the Black Vicky Chaparyan Lebanese University Abstract Toni Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved, represents a postmodern traumatic story the characters of which deal with black history and the scars it has left on the African American community. As Rafael Perez-Torres claims, “the story of slavery invoked by Beloved is built on the absence of power, the absence of self-determination, the absence of homeland, the absence of a language” (Perez-Torres 1993:131). Throughout the story T. Morrison gives a voice to a ghost to speak up, but she takes away the voice of the ghost’s mother who does not have the power to tell her story about her infanticide and so, has a troubled relationship with language. Later, Beloved’s sister, Denver, who becomes dumb and deaf after learning the story about her mother’s infanticide, gets back her senses when she goes to the community to ask for help to nurture her suffering mother. Although T. Morrison treats different themes, the following paper is an attempt to study the importance of language in Beloved, through comparing the Maternity symbolic order in Morrison to the Paternity symbolic order in Jacque Lacan’s The Psychoses (1955-1956). Key words: Beloved, slavery, Maternity symbolic order, Paternity symbolic order, J. Lacan, unspeakable thoughts, language, ghost, story of trauma.
On February 27th, 2012, the world at large did not know who Trayvon Martin was. He was not a headline nor a subject of public debate; he was simply a dead black boy. A month later, his story was finally broadcasts, but he was soon thought to be the cause of his own death. He chose the wrong thing to wear, and had the unfortunate burden of being a young black male. More and more black victims are constantly being put on trail for their own deaths. There is a dark root on the tree that bears this stranger fruit; a sickness of cultural coding that denies justice, creates inequalities, and perpetuates destructive stereotypes. In my paper I look at how cultural coding implements framing black victims in a negative light, recriminalizing black victims, and uses the appropriate power structures such as legislature and the dominant media, to continue the coding of present and potential black victims. I look at how through constant disclosure of negatively skewed statistics and withholding positive actions by black males, the dominant culture keeps the code in place. I question the reprogramming of the code, stating that only through education, social and political mobilization, and legislation change will this change. I highlight the current plight of organizations that seek to change the narrative of black men and uproot the tree that bears stranger fruit.
International Review of Qualitative Inquiry, 2021
Black feminist thought and Black feminist autoethnography are the theoretical and methodological tools that I use to explore transnational identity construction as a Black, Trinidadian-American woman who has experienced hyper(in)visibility. Three letters capture my epiphanic moments as the outsider-within. I stage an interaction with the late literary-activist-scholar, James Baldwin, to address identity-making through race and transnationality, and to problematize interpersonal, structural, and disciplinary forms of power that shape my identity. My critical autoethnography is a self-story-a story that is always navigating between dual citizenships and culture. I place my epiphanic moments in conversation with those of James Baldwin to highlight Black experience from the past and present to provide new ways of narrating difference.
Spectrum: A Journal on Black Men, 2012
e adage, "a good black man is hard to nd," has been a common refrain in black cultural communities for decades. Using this common saying as a departure point, this essay turns to a similar sentiment within scholarship and challenges readers of black men to move toward more transgressive reading practices. Using performative texts, this essay explores how we might develop new reading practices of a "complex black manhood," moving beyond a good/bad binary. Jamal Joseph's pastiche visual collection, Tupac Shakur Legacy and Tarrell Alvin McCraney's play, e Brothers Size teaches us how to read black men's bodies and practices of masculinity in new ways. is essay explores how both Joseph and Mc-Craney activate a black radical imaginary that does not begin with damage, but tells an uneasy and complex narrative of black manhood through (re)presentations and resistance to the dominant gaze toward black male deviance. e authors of these texts encourage new reading practices of "what might be" in black manhood which move us away from canonical prejudices and reorients us toward new, complex (de)scripts for black men.
Rhizomes, 2019
International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation
James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and the Rhetorics of Black Male Subjectivity', Aaron Oforlea, analyses the strategies that Toni Morrison and James Baldwin employ in their quest to tell the African-American story. He uses subjectivity, intersectionality, discursive divide, among others, to explain to the reader the issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. He analyses their African American characters and how they thrived despite their problems of social alienation, sexual preferences, and class status. The discursive divide is a concept discussed throughout the novel; it entails moving from the objects of discourse to an empowered agent. In this paper, we will highlight the various concepts addressed by the authors in each chapter.
AmeriQuests, 2008
Studies of male behaviors, male ways of being, and identity in the U.S. academy (Connell 2005; Hine and Jenkins 2001; Mansfield 2007; Neal 2005; Richardson 2007) and in the political arena-as with George W. Bush's 2003 $45 million budget request to support fatherhood initiatives among faith-based and community organizations that promote involved, committed, responsible fatherhood-suggest that America is concerned with masculinity. In February 2001, President George W. Bush's budget blueprint on -America's Priorities‖ declared fatherhood a -national priority.‖ The thinking in this declaration was that -. . . fathers factor significantly in the lives of their children. There is simply no substitute for the love, involvement, and commitment of a responsible father‖ (Bush 2001). Black men are no strangers to questions of masculinity, fathering, and national belonging. Even before Bush's epiphany, leading black male figures had organized the widely televised Million Man March (MMM) of 1995 less than a thousand feet from the Oval Office (reprising it ten years later in October 2005) to parse the crises around black manhood in America in which fathering, the family, and fathers' roles figured significantly. Bush's epiphany, the marches, the frenzied attention paid to the -down low‖ phenomenon, and the subsequent demonization of black gay male sexuality continue to offer intriguing points of intersection and reflection on matters of sex, race, gender, and masculinity. The precarious state of black masculinity is laden with racial tensions. And certainly there is a dire need to provide alternative images of black men to counter the media-contrived -images,‖ in the words of the controversial Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan, -of who and what we really are‖ (Farrakhan 2005). As black men explore what and who they really are, it is clear that the spiraling gang affiliations and violence, rampant police brutality in black communities, the brutal beatings of Abner Louima and Rodney King, the shootings of Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell, and historic events like the Los Angeles riots and the racially tinged media coverage of Hurricane Katrina point to serious problems between white America and black men. In the last two decades, an impressive body of work has emerged from scholars on black masculinity and black male sexualities. However, studies about black life, the black family, the black father, and black masculinity by black people have a long and well-documented history. Questions of -manhood‖ have been under investigation prior to and since emancipation. There are many characteristics and experiences that define black men. Life experiences for all have changed throughout the years, as have the laws and the privileges that people have come to enjoy. Nonetheless, core themes can be found in a diverse array of literature written by and about black men: black men's personal struggles to attain and define freedom, manhood, and their identity. Perhaps the first literary foray to undertake such themes was an intriguing account of slavery by Gustavus Vassa-pen name Olaudah Equiano-in 1789 with his The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African. Critic Cassandra Pybus refers to the author of this narrative as -the most famous black man of the age‖ in her Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for
2015
once asserted that "all art is a kind of confession" and that if artists are to survive they need to tell the whole story; to "vomit the anguish up". 1 For Baldwin, the anguish in need of expulsion is arguably the topic he most often wrote about, namely the social and cultural conditioning processes with which racial violence and racism are inexorably linked. This theme is something Baldwin wrote on in relation to his critical assessment of American society´s failure to properly address race relations. He also addresses these issues in relation to the world and human nature in general, and also to the ways literature can act as both a redemptive medium -highlighting the ways in which society can change for the better, as well as working within the assumption that literature can also be limiting in terms of the understanding of race issues in America. The "whole story" is symptomatic with another feature in Baldwin´s work -both fiction and nonfiction. One of the most powerful and poignant characteristics is the ways in which he uses himself, his own childhood and adult experiences, and link those biographical elements within a larger, national context of race, sexuality and religion -some of Baldwin´s literary motifs. 2
James Baldwin Review, 2016
Recent killings of unarmed black citizens are a fresh reminder of the troubled state of racial integration in the United States. At the same time, the unfolding Black Lives Matter protest movements and the responses by federal agencies each testify to a not insignificant capacity for addressing social pathologies surrounding the color line. In order to respond to this ambivalent situation, this article suggests a pairing between the work of James Baldwin and that of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. I will argue that we cannot fully appreciate the depths of what Baldwin called the "savage paradox" of race without the insights provided by Klein and object relations psychoanalysis. Conversely, Baldwin helps us to sound out the political significance of object relations approaches, including the work of Klein and those influenced by her such as Hanna Segal and Wilfred Bion. In conversation with the work of Baldwin, object relations theory can help to identify particular social settings and institutions that might allow concrete efforts toward racial justice to take root.
The Urban Review, 1999
This article excavates the voices of urban black males as they "speak their name" (Belton, 1996) in a society that denies them this right. Based on data gathered in a large-scale ethnographic interview study of urban America, the authors traverse the spoken lives of these men, as they weave stories about neighborhood and state violence, opportunities denied and missed, and the current power of black men's groups in the church. Through their day-today lives urban black men challenge social representations about them in racist America, constructing an alternative hegemonic masculinity revolving around relationships, fatherhood, and dignity. We have traversed the soil of North America, bringing advantage to it as farmer, mule trainer, singer, shaper of wood and iron. We have picked cotton and shined shoes, we have bludgeoned the malleable parts of ourselves into new and brash identities that are shattered and bruised by the gun and the bullet. And now the only duty our young men seem ready to imagine is to their maleness with its reckless display of braggadocio, its bright intelligence, its bold and foolish embrace of hate and happenstance. If we are not our brother's keeper, then we are still our brother's witness. We are coconspirators in his story and in his future. August Wilson, Introduction to Speak My Name (1996)
Men and Masculinities, 2019
who had experienced wartime intimacy with other men breathed the "melancholy air of repentance" (p. 158). "Fear," Ibson argues, "was the fundamental emotion of the era," driven by the cultural hysteria surrounding the "monstrous conjoined twin" of communism and homosexuality (p. 161). Fathers were deployed to the front lines to fight against the "national concern over sissy sons" (p. 163). The emotional costs of these rigid expressions of manliness reverberated into the next generation of sons.
Journal of Liberal Arts and Humanities (JLAH), 2022
This paper attempts to analyze the depiction of black life in Richard Wright's Black Boy. It examines how socio-cultural circumstances create obstacles for Negroes and make black community suffer. Black Boy, which depicts extreme poverty and the writer's accounts of racial violence against the blacks, primarily is an attack on racist Southern white society. Utilizing the narrative inquiry approach, it concentrates on black American life and highlights the issues of racism and gender oppression. The conflict between the black and the white communities, the victimization of the blacks by the dominant whites, and the violence and bloodshed within the black communities have been the dominant themes in Wright's works. This paper claims that black American literature opposes racism and oppression in all ramifications to overcome the self-pride and self-identity of black race. The pursuit of identity is a continuous process where the potential aspects of the present and the past, of the individual and society, play a vital role.
James Baldwin Review, 2020
“Baldwin’s Transatlantic Reverberations: Between ‘Stranger in the Village’ and I Am Not Your Negro.” Paola Bacchetta, Jovita dos Santos Pinto, Noémi Michel, Patricia Purtschert, and Vanessa Näf. James Baldwin Review, vol. 6., 176-198. (Fall 2020). James Baldwin’s writing, his persona, as well as his public speeches, interviews, and discussions are undergoing a renewed reception in the arts, in queer and critical race studies, and in queer of color movements. Directed by Raoul Peck, the film I Am Not Your Negro decisively contributed to the rekindled circulation of Baldwin across the Atlantic. Since 2017, screenings and commentaries on the highly acclaimed film have prompted discussions about the persistent yet variously racialized temporal-spatial formations of Europe and the U.S. Stemming from a roundtable that fol- lowed a screening in Zurich in February 2018, this collective essay wanders between the audio-visual and textual matter of the film and Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village,” which was also adapted into a film-essay directed by Pierre Koralnik, staging Baldwin in the Swiss village of Leukerbad. Privileging Black feminist, post- colonial, and queer of color perspectives, we identify three sites of Baldwin’s trans- atlantic reverberations: situated knowledge, controlling images, and everyday sexual racism. In conclusion, we reflect on the implications of racialized, sexualized politics for today’s Black feminist, queer, and trans of color movements located in continental Europe—especially in Switzerland and France.
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