This fine collection of essays represents an important contribution
to the rediscovery of Baldwin's stature as essayist, novelist,
black prophetic political voice, and witness to the Civil Rights
era. The title provides an excellent thematic focus. He understood
both the necessity, and the impossibility, of being a black
'American' writer. He took these issues 'Beyond'---Paris, Istanbul,
various parts of Africa---but this formative experience only
returned him to the unresolved dilemmas. He was a fine novelist and
a major prophetic political voice. He produced some of the most
important essays of the twentieth century and addressed in depth
the complexities of the black political movement. His relative
invisibility almost lost us one of the most significant voices of
his generation. This welcome 'revival' retrieves it. Close call.
---Stuart Hall, Professor Emeritus, Open University This
interdisciplinary collection by leading writers in their fields
brings together a discussion of the many facets of James Baldwin,
both as a writer and as the prophetic conscience of a 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
that 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.
With contributions by Kevin Birmingham, Douglas Field, Kevin
Gaines, Briallen Hopper, Quentin Miller, Vaughn Rasberry, Robert
Reid-Pharr, George Shulman, Hortense Spillers, Colm Toibin, Eleanor
W. Traylor, Cheryl A. Wall, and Magdalena Zaborowska.
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