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Often overlooked by James Baldwin criticism or addressed according to its unique relationship to sex and gender, love plays a central role in the writer’s oeuvre. This article, conceived as a contrapuntal reading between A Dialogue (1972)—the transcript of a four-hour conversation between James Baldwin and poet Nikki Giovanni in November 1971—and If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), Baldwin’s fifth novel, will shed light on Baldwin’s “poethics” of love in the 1970s, after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and the author’s engagement with Black Power and feminism. This revision takes its cues from intersectionality and extends them via Hortense Spillers’s bold critique of Baldwin’s politics of intimacy, his writing style, and the American family grammar. His vision of love as moral “energy” not only anticipates what Denise Ferreira da Silva terms a “Black Feminist Poethics,” but is also a potential “key” to end “the racial nightmare” and “save the children,” thereby becoming a poethics of love for the infancy of the world.
James Baldwin Review offers readers a reprint of a rare archival find, an article from Emerge magazine, first published in October of 1989, which ran with this abstract: “A magazine editor recalls working with his literary hero and getting to know the surprisingly vulnerable, charming, and often exasperating man behind the legend.”
Like much of his prose and nonfiction, Baldwin’s poetry follows his actual and figurative movement between Europe and America against the backdrop of his homeland’s constant refusal to work through its racist, imperialist, and heterosexist legacies. The 2014 reissue of his two poetry collections, Jimmy’s Blues (1983) and Gypsy (1989), as Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems urges us to revisit Baldwin’s poetry as an expression of his ideas and sentiments through a different lens: that of a blues poetics. In Baldwin’s poetry, the blues provide an aesthetic and epistemic framework for his expression of a radical internationalist politics of liberation.
Justin A. Joyce introduces the ninth volume of James Baldwin Review with a discussion of I Heard It Through the Grapevine (1982), “The Uses of the Blues” (1964), Florida, and Fox News.
1963 was a defining year in James Baldwin’s life as a public intellectual. Beginning in January with a trip to Jackson, Mississippi, and closing at a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee conference in Washington, DC, Baldwin often frequented the speaking rostrum. On October 7, he spoke at a Freedom Day event organized by SNCC’s Jim Forman in Selma, Alabama. That speech, recorded by a private citizen and heretofore unremarked upon, can be productively read as part of Baldwin’s ongoing radicalization, away from a solution that privileged rhetorical (re)invention and toward destructive and collective acts designed to subvert American capitalism. At another register, Baldwin’s speech functioned as an important culmination to an eight-month campaign to bring voting rights—and the federal government—to Dallas County, Alabama.
The author reviews the recently released short film The Baldwin Archives (Laura Seay, 2022), and argues that, in restaging the most important moments of Baldwin’s 1963 interview for the BBC television program Bookstand, it helps us understand better Baldwin’s belief that people had a moral obligation “to deal with other people as though they were simply human beings.” Following the rise of the Black Power movement in the mid-1960s, this belief contributed to Baldwin’s marginalization by a younger generation of Black activists who identified it with a lack of militancy that they attributed to his gender and sexual nonconformity. But in focusing on the moments in the BBC interview where Baldwin elaborated his understanding of this obligation, The Baldwin Archives enables us to grasp its radicalism more fully.
This article illustrates the multi-generational influence of Baldwin’s The Evidence of Things Not Seen on my path as a Black scholar and draws connections between representation, identity, kinship, and the interdependence of Black writers in the fight for social justice. Through tracing Baldwin’s working relationship with my father, former editor of Playboy magazine Walter Lowe Jr., I hope to illuminate the relational underpinnings of Baldwin’s work on the Atlanta child murders, thereby foregrounding the complexities of Black life. This article recognizes Baldwin’s work in Evidence as more than just a new-wave logistical, strategic, textual model of resistance but also as a mode of artistic production arising from a tradition that is deeply felt, collaborative, improvisational, and ancestrally rooted.
Cecil Brown is nearing eighty years old and starting new projects all the time. He is currently writing a historical novel about the life of the enslaved poet George Moses Horton and a memoir about his friendship with James Baldwin. He met Baldwin early in his career, during a trip to Europe after the translation of his first novel, The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger (1969) [trans. La vie et les amours de Mr. Jiveass le Nègre, 1972]. They remained friends until Baldwin’s death in 1987. This interview collates several conversations about Baldwin that took place in December 2022 and January 2023. Brown reflects on their relationship, on Baldwin’s influence for him personally, and on the meaning of Black cultural celebrity more broadly; he also touches on Baldwin’s situation between Black Power and Black feminism, and the ramifications of the politics of the 1970s for the present.
Do humanitarian workers really trust numbers? In the realm of the DATAWAR research project, this article aims to investigate the interest that humanitarian workers have developed towards quantitative data in the last two decades. The ‘needology’ approach (Glasman, 2020), growing expectations of donors since the 2000s, and the professionalisation and rationalisation of the humanitarian field are all factors that have contributed to the massive use of quantitative data. Discourses promoting ‘evidence-based humanitarianism’ have fostered massive hope in the humanitarian community: a good use of quantitative data could enhance contextual analyses, intervention monitoring or even the safety and security of humanitarian workers. However, this study has discovered that these narratives overestimate the ease with which humanitarian workers deal with numbers. In fact, it shows that the use of quantitative data is mainly determined by a specific, restrictive, hierarchically oriented evidence-based system which nurtures bottom-up accountability rather than day-to-day project management. As a result, the datafication of the humanitarian field does not seem to have been accompanied by an improvement of the data literacy of humanitarian workers.
The article shows how the data of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) remain ‘poor numbers’. First, because of the intrinsic uncertainty that presides over their production, but above all because of their necessary translation into the media system to trigger responses to crises. Drawing on Boltanski’s thesis on the politics of pity, it emphasises how figures are seen as a partial element of media rhetoric. The figures becomes a performative number when combined with registers of emotion and collective representations of famine. Two examples are developed through interviews with humanitarian practitioners: the crisis in Yemen (2018) as an ‘overexposed crisis’ and the crisis in Madagascar (2021) as a ‘silent crisis’.