Trends in James Baldwin Criticism 2013–15

Abstract

James Baldwin might be imagined as reaching his greatest level of popularity within this current decade. With the growth of social media activist movements like Black Lives Matter, which captures and catalyzes off a Baldwinian rage, and the publishing of works directly evoking Baldwin, his voice appears more pronounced between the years of 2013 and 2015. Scholars in Baldwin studies, along with strangers who were turned into witnesses of his literary oeuvre, have contributed to this renewed interest in Baldwin, or at least have been able to sharpen the significance of the phenomenon. Publications and performances highlight Baldwin’s work and how it prefigured developments in critical race and queer theories, while also demonstrating Baldwin’s critique as both prophetic and “disturbingly” contemporary. Emerging largely from Baldwin’s timelessness in social and political discourse, and from the need to conjure a figure to demystify the absurd American landscape, these interventions in Baldwin studies follow distinct trends. This essay examines the 2013–15 trends from four vantages: an examination of a return, with revision, to popular work by Baldwin; identifying Baldwin’s work as a contributor to theoretical and critical methodology; Baldwin and intertextuality or intervocality; and a new frontier in Baldwin studies.

The Evidence of Things Translated

“…64 For over a decade, several scholars have also investigated Baldwin's global imaginaries. 65 Meanwhile, Baldwin's image looms, often quite literally, over transnational pop culture. Based on the evidence of things translated, however, there remains a notable discrepancy between the narrative of Baldwin's omnipresence in post-national Western culture at large, and the much more manageableor should that be marketable?-conservative selections of his oeuvre that European publishers offer their readership.…”

Trends in James Baldwin Criticism, 2015–16

“…Echoing observations made in Miller's and Gibson's overviews of scholarship produced within the first five years of our current decade, critics in 2015-16 continue to pursue scholarly questions relating to Baldwin's literature and other art forms, to Baldwin's transnational literary imagination, and to his connection to other authors and literary works; in turn, they remain, as Gibson describes, drawn "to the familiar" in Baldwin studies. 3 One such example of turning back to the "familiar" is a persistent interest in Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). Markedly, the two scholarly articles published on Go Tell It that appeared in 2015-16 demonstrate a new attention being shown to more canonized works of Baldwin by long-standing journals of literary criticism.…”