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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.
, highlighting the exclusionary ways in which history is written and remembered and retelling similar stories from different perspectives to address issues as diverse as abolitionism and segregation, the relationship between science and faith, and predestination and grace, sex work and gender politics, and the state of political thought in the contemporary United States. Robinson is similarly unconventional in her approach to a writing career. In a 2016 lecture published as “Our Public Conversation: How America Talks About Itself” (2018), Robinson makes the
’s identities as a ‘scientist’ and a ‘statesman’.11 It is certainly clear from several of his works that Bacon found a degree of incommensurability between ethical (specifically Christian) and civic values,12 and that many of the conditions praised in his natural philosophy are condemned Price_04_Ch4 62 14/10/02, 9:33 am Ethics and politics 63 elsewhere in his writings. Markku Peltonen stresses that the repeated identification of Bacon’s philosophical with his political thought relies upon a ‘rhetorical similarity’ which can obscure the distinction Bacon makes between
, ‘ The subversive “ Seulette ” ’, in M. Brabant (ed.), Politics, Gender and Genre: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan ( Boulder, CO : Westview Press , 1992 ), pp. 157 – 69 . For discussions of the voice of her political writings, see N. Margolis , ‘ “The cry of the chameleon
Essays in Socialism (1889), Shaw had directly challenged Spencer and other ‘modern anarchists’ for their belief ‘that a right and just social order was not an artificial and painfully maintained legal edifice, but a spontaneous outcome of the free play of the forces of Nature’. In You Can Never Tell , first performed in 1894, he went on to mock this brand of social and political thought with the figure
writer’s future use of a transnational frame and his love for thrillers, visible for example in The Secret History of Las Vegas and Lagos Noir . 27 The analogy between the figures of the father and of the sovereign is one of the founding, and most ancient, axioms of Western political thought. The father/children coupling is only one of the numerous parings structuring a configuration that, as Derrida states, is ‘both systematic and hierarchical: at the summit is the sovereign (master, king
‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. Nietzsche identified this brand of philosophy as not just a failure of the imagination, but a threat to the future of Europe and the West, which would continue to decline as long as they remained wedded to this strain of ethical and political thought. As the author tells us, Nietzsche ‘hated English democratic institutions and advised Germany against
-Darwinian’ political thought in the years leading up to the conflict, as partisan opportunism had corrupted parliaments across Europe and created internecine conflicts between nations. In response to this state of affairs, Shaw translates evolutionary theory into international relations and suggests that ‘if the Western Powers had selected their allies in the Lamarckian manner intelligently, purposefully, and vitally
away. Notes 1 For the relationship between Hobbes and Hyde, see Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Edward Hyde and Thomas Hobbes’s Elements of Law, Natural and Politic’, Historical Journal, 32.2 (1989), 303–17. 2 Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, ed. by Paul Seaward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 6–10; the latest and most sophisticated account of the attack on Hobbes in 1666–68 is Jon Parkin, ‘Baiting the Bear: the Anglican attack on Hobbes in the later 1660s’, History of Political Thought, 34.3 (2013), 421–58. 3 Richard Ollard, Clarendon and his Friends (London
temporal kings.124 However, her political thinking –and her claim of a licence to preach –was inherited from the very large number of women writers who had gone before her and for whom the civil wars, but, more significantly, the Republic, represented an authorising moment in English history. Therefore, when Patricia Crawford once argued that the impact of the civil wars and Interregnum ‘was remarkable’, she was absolutely correct. However, this chapter offers an addition to her analysis, finding that the most far-reaching consequences for gender and political thought