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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.
Tracing the journal’s history, Justin A. Joyce introduces the tenth anniversary volume of James Baldwin Review.
During an overloaded and intense western tour for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Baldwin spoke to an audience of over three thousand in the packed auditorium of the Masonic Temple on Mason Street in the Nob Hill section of San Francisco on May 7, 1963. The overwhelming size of the crowd at the Masonic Temple had delayed the start of Baldwin’s speech by an hour. Speaking that evening for a little over forty minutes, Baldwin delivered on his promise to script a confrontation between the worldview of his audiences and the fiercely present need for the country to change itself. To Baldwin this meant that his audiences must change themselves and, maybe even more profoundly, each other. The transcription below has been prepared by Ed Pavlić and Justin A. Joyce. Vocal emphasis has been captured with italics. Significant pauses, interruptions, and non-word interjections have been captured in editorial brackets. The recording of the speech can be found here: https://www.pacificaradioarchives.org/recording/bb0838.
Eulogy delivered at James Baldwin’s funeral. Published in The New York Times, December 20, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 27, Column 1; Book Review Desk.
“Monster in the Archive” asks what the presence of a figure with a massive archival presence like James Baldwin does to our understanding of the presumed “absence” or “lack” of Black subjects in American archives. Paying careful attention to Michel Foucault’s observations about archives in “Lives of Infamous Men” as well as Baldwin’s correspondence with his friend, Mary Painter, this article argues that Baldwin’s “exceptionality” forces scholars and archivists to treat his archival presence as monstrous. Moreover, it argues that we need to develop new methods to approach Black archives. Again, following Foucault, the article proposes that we imagine approaching archives through the lens of friendship suggested by Foucault shortly before his death.