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The introduction provides background information about the Girls’ Friendly Society (GFS) and articulates how studying this organisation can enrich understandings of gender, childhood, whiteness, and colonialism. The introduction situates this book in relation to existing scholarship about childhood history, whiteness, youth organisations, colonial cultures, and migration. Youth organisations can provide singular insights into how the British understood their empire and their imperial visions and ambitions, and although robust scholarship exists about contemporary organisations, most notably the Girl Guides, comparatively little research has been done on the GFS. The introduction provides an overview of book’s methodology and its multi-sited framework, which enables broader comparative analyses about the diverse experiences of colonial girlhood. It also reflects on the challenges of researching girlhood and specifically of finding girls’ voices in the archive. The introduction draws attention to key themes that will re-emerge throughout the book, including contested definitions of girlhood, and provides an overview of the chapters.
This chapter outlines the rationale of the book and its structure. It provides a brief synopsis of each chapter. It explains that while the book intends to study each Simon family member individually, its main aim is to consider the family as a whole to uncover how their various contributions to society were motivated by a distinct family ethos of public service.
This article explores the history of Baldwin Studies in the USSR and post-Soviet countries (Azerbajian, Belarus, Russia, Ukraine), which is illustrative of literary approaches and interpretations characteristic of Soviet scholarship. First translations of his short stories, essays, and the play Blues for Mr. Charlie appeared in the early 1960s, followed by commentaries in leading Soviet literary and popular journals. For ideological reasons, in the 1960–70s the focus was on the writer’s public stance and involvement in the civil rights movement. It was only in the years of perestroika—“openness”—and the 1990s that his oeuvre in its entirety began to be discussed without taboos, omissions, or ideological bias. In the 2000s, the focus shifted to discussions of aspects of Baldwin’s method and peculiarities of his style. At present, James Baldwin is regarded as a key personality in contemporary US literature, though interest in his literary heritage has somewhat subsided.
Cornel West was interviewed by Christopher Lydon for Radio Open Source; the interview was originally broadcast in September of 2017. They discuss the works of Baldwin, the condition of America, and Baldwin’s relevance to that condition today. The interview is reprinted here by permission of the interviewee.
This article presents a genealogy of James Baldwin’s novel Another Country through a series of archival manuscripts dating from 1944. It argues that the nearly two-decades writing process informs a central theme of Another Country: the painful self-knowledge that comes from self-confrontation. The article offers this explanation to complement other contemporary interpretations of this theme of self-knowledge, particularly those of Mikko Tuhkanen and E. J. Martínez.
Recent scholarship has clarified the centrality of psychoanalytic concepts like desire and the unconscious to James Baldwin’s major fiction and political essays, though it has not yet addressed his notable distaste for talk-based mental health care including clinical psychoanalysis. The writer’s complex position on psychoanalysis both reflected the prestige of clinical psychoanalysis at midcentury, and responded to white colleagues’ racist use of psychoanalytic concepts. His fiction and political essays also participated consequentially in a broader post-Freudian psychoanalytic discourse. Giovanni’s Room (1956) in particular engages significantly with prolific contemporary US analyst Edmund Bergler. Baldwin’s psychoanalysis was an attempt to seize Freudian conceptuality from reactionary, pro-normative institutions, and put it to work for human freedom, one that achieved partial success. Examining the full range of the writer’s psychoanalytic thought, including its contradictions, refines his intellectual biography.
Eulogy delivered at Baldwin’s funeral, along with those by Morrison and Angelou. Published in The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, ed. William J. Harris (Berkeley, CA, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), pp. 450–6.
Published in The New York Times, December 20, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 30, Column 2; Book Review Desk.