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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.
This essay uses Edward Said’s theory of affiliation to consider the relationship between James Baldwin and contemporary artists Teju Cole and Glenn Ligon, both of whom explicitly engage with their predecessor’s writing in their own work. Specifically, Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village” (1953) serves a through-line for this discussion, as it is invoked in Cole’s essay “Black Body” and Ligon’s visual series, also titled Stranger in the Village. In juxtaposing these three artists, I argue that they express the dialectical energy of affiliation by articulating ongoing concerns of race relations in America while distinguishing themselves from Baldwin in terms of periodization, medium-specificity, and their broader relationship to Western art practice. In their adoption of Baldwin, Cole and Ligon also imagine a way beyond his historical anxieties and writing-based practice, even as they continue to reinscribe their own work with his arguments about the African-American experience. This essay is an intermedial study that reads fiction, nonfiction, language-based conceptual art and mixed media, as well as contemporary politics and social media in order consider the nuances of the African-American experience from the postwar period to our contemporary moment. Concerns about visuality/visibility in the public sphere, narrative voice, and self-representation, as well as access to cultural artifacts and aesthetic engagement, all emerge in my discussion of this constellation of artists. As a result, this essay identifies an emblematic, though not exclusive, strand of African-American intellectual thinking that has never before been brought together. It also demonstrates the ongoing relevance of Baldwin’s thinking for the contemporary political scene in this country.
crises, they increasingly encounter media content that blurs the line between reality and fiction. This includes everything from rumours and exaggerations on social media, through to partisan journalism, satire and completely invented stories that are designed to look like real news articles. Although this media content varies enormously, it is often grouped together under nebulous and all-encompassing terms such as ‘fake news’, ‘disinformation’ or ‘post-truth’ media. Scholars have started to pay serious attention to the production and impact of all
humanitarian communication, and you get a different picture: here, history is everywhere. No website of any major humanitarian organization comes along without its own history section. On YouTube, humanitarian players provide an ever growing number of documentaries about their past and origins. Fundraising campaigns, mass mailings, and social media posts all point frequently to historical achievements. Major aid organizations now also call on their branches to ‘enhance the historical and cultural
, where there are IEDs and shootouts, to receiving death threats on social media. It’s not that easy to handle and it can take a toll on morale. But these people aren’t really an operational impediment. The much bigger problem is that states and the EU are ignoring conventions and laws. The Dublin Regulation – for what it’s worth – is being undermined. It is now, in Europe, that the refugee protection regime is being buried. In June [2018], the Aquarius, carrying 630 people to Europe, was refused entry to Italian ports. France has also prevented
), ‘ Five Questions for Digital Migration Studies: Learning from Digital Connectivity and Forced Migration In(To) Europe ’, Social Media+ Society , 4 : 1 , doi: 10.1177/2056305118764425 . Madianou , M. ( 2019 ), ‘ Technocolonialism: Digital Innovation and Data Practices in the Humanitarian Response to Refugee Crises ’, Social
spectrum and témoignage is one of those. [At MSF, we want] to speak out and highlight the plights of populations caught in humanitarian crises. In those days [before MSF was created], we didn’t have social media, TV was just coming out and unless you put on a table what was happening in Nigeria during the Biafra war, it was not necessarily attracting attention from the global world. So out of outrage we were bearing witness. 1 Through the years, of course, other organizations realized it doesn’t necessarily change policies on the preemptive level. For MSF, we
, populist – mostly right-wing – movements and their racial hatred aimed at targeting minorities. But it does not stop here, as at the same time those who stand for humanitarian values and try to uphold them become targets. This in effect is an attack on the belief that all lives matter and are worth of being saved. Disinformation campaigns that are now easily spread via social media and other informal networks, the report argues, threaten humanitarian action unless humanitarians develop strategies to
monitoring approach, or whether a more discerning one is warranted. Methodology This paper draws on an analysis of scholarly literature, policy documents, media and social media. The analysis is also informed by interviews with 32 individuals, who were predominantly healthcare workers and representatives of organisations active in the medical-humanitarian response in northern Syria. Interviews were conducted in the period January to June 2017, mostly in the
refugees and migrants and 22 interviews with humanitarian workers indicated that, while social media were used extensively by refugees and migrants to network with family and friends, these platforms were not their preferred channel for receiving information on their situation in Greece, and refugees and migrants expressed preferences for written documents, posters or verbal communication ( Ghandour-Demiri, 2017 ). For these reasons, language and its translation are operational challenges for