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This review essay compares the research methodologies and narrative strategies of Baldwin biographies as well as their main claims. Analyzing these books in their chronological order, it seeks to chart a history of book-length knowledge production about the dynamics between Baldwin’s ideas, art, personal life, and public roles. The conclusion of this review essay heralds the future of biographical research in Baldwin Studies. It also proposes two new narratives about Baldwin: a chronicle of his responses to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s surveillance of him and a broader chronicle of his responses to Cold War conservatism.
Filmmaker Karen Thorsen gave us James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket, the award-winning documentary that is now considered a classic. First broadcast on PBS/American Masters in August, 1989—just days after what would have been Baldwin’s 65th birthday—the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1990. It was not the film Thorsen intended to make. Beginning in 1986, she and Baldwin had been collaborating on a very different film project: a “nonfiction feature” about the history, research, and writing of Baldwin’s next book, Remember This House. It was also going to be a film about progress: how far we had come, how far we still had to go, before we learned to trust our common humanity. The following memoir explores how and why their collaboration began. This recollection will be serialized in two parts, with the second installment appearing in James Baldwin Review’s seventh issue, due out in the fall of 2021.
Rather than write a classic biography of James Baldwin in the last cycle of his life—from his arrival in 1970 as a black stranger in the all-white medieval village of Saint-Paul, until his death there in 1987—I sought to discover the author through the eyes of people who knew him in this period. With this optic, I sought a wide variety of people who were in some way part of his life there: friends, lovers, barmen, writers, artists, taxi drivers, his doctors and others who retained memories of their encounters with Baldwin on all levels. Besides the many locals, contact was made with a number of Baldwin’s further afield cultural figures including Maya Angelou, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Angela Davis, Bill Wyman, and others. There were more than seventy interviews in person in places as distant as Paris, New York or Istanbul and by telephone spread over four years during the preparatory research and writing of the manuscript. Many of the recollections centred on “at home with Jimmy” or dining at his “Welcome Table.”
Filmmaker Karen Thorsen gave us James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket, the award-winning documentary that is now considered a classic. First broadcast on PBS/American Masters in August, 1989—just days after what would have been Baldwin’s sixty-fifth birthday—the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1990. It was not the film Thorsen intended to make. Beginning in 1986, Baldwin and Thorsen had been collaborating on a very different film project: a “nonfiction feature” about the history, research, and writing of Baldwin’s next book, “Remember This House.” It was also going to be a film about progress: about how far we had come, how far we still have to go, before we learn to trust our common humanity. But that project ended abruptly. On 1 December 1987, James Baldwin died—and “Remember This House,” book and film died with him. Suddenly, Thorsen’s mission changed: the world needed to know what they had lost. Her alliance with Baldwin took on new meaning. The following memoir—the second of two serialized parts—explores how and why their collaboration began. The first installment appeared in the sixth volume of James Baldwin Review, in the fall of 2020; the next stage of their journey starts here.
these memories, as acts of vicarious witnessing, different from other types of culturally mediated memory? Through tracing and analysing how creative writers use historical research in their work it is possible to explore in what ways, and on what terms, we remember and re-imagine the world wars now, or to ‘record the historically evolving relation of individuals and communities to sites and the associated transmutations of memory and identity’, as Anne Whitehead puts it.5 This book uses this procedural, archival analysis to ask a number of questions. What factors
In 1872, a young archaeologist at the British Museum made a tremendous discovery. While he was working his way through a Mesopotamian ‘slush pile’, George Smith, a self-taught expert in ancient languages, happened upon a Babylonian version of Noah’s Flood. His research suggested this ‘Deluge Tablet’ pre-dated the writing of Genesis by a millennium or more. Smith went on to translate what later became The Epic of Gilgamesh, perhaps the oldest and most complete work of literature from any culture. Against the backdrop of innovative readings of a range of paintings, novels, histories and photographs (by figures like Dickens, Eliot, James, Dyce, Turner, Macaulay and Carlyle), this book demonstrates the Gordian complexity of the Victorians’ relationship with history, while also seeking to highlight the Epic’s role in influencing models of time in late-Victorian geology. Discovering Gilgamesh will be of interest to readers, students and researchers in literary studies, Victorian studies, history, intellectual history, art history and archaeology.
’s writing, and why. I also analyse Barker’s use of source material, exploring her research in detail, and showing how she uses her freedom as a novelist to ‘regenerate’ the historical record left to us in source material. Barker begins Regeneration by breaking a convention of the war novel; it is set away from the fighting, in Craiglockhart, a military hospital for shellshocked officers in Scotland. Barker does not show us the war itself, but takes us away from the Western Front, to a place where every character is trying to interpret past war experience. Her protagonist
The Great War still haunts us. This book draws together examples of the ‘aesthetic pacifism’ practised during the Great War by such celebrated individuals as Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon and Bertrand Russell. It also tells the stories of those less well known who shared the attitudes of the Bloomsbury Group when it came to facing the first ‘total war’. The five-year research for this study gathered evidence from all the major archives in Great Britain and abroad in order to paint a complete picture of this unique form of anti-war expression. The narrative begins with the Great War's effect on philosopher-pacifist Bertrand Russell and Cambridge University.
of the psychic landscape. One of the most immediate consequences of Olson’s researches is his dismantling of the temporal partition between myth and history and his reach for a unified field theory through the concept of a human universe. In traditional cosmogonies, mythic events take place in a time sealed off from history, but archaic wonder at the before hardens into the dualism of there and here in Western religion and philosophy. This dualism lingers on in the conventions of languaged representation, past the liveness of the tradition.12 In ‘Human Universe
This study applies the concept of postmemory, developed in Holocaust studies, to novels by contemporary British writers. The first monograph-length study of postmemory in British fiction, it focuses on a group of texts about the World Wars. Building upon current work on historical fiction, specifically historiographical metafiction and memory studies, this work extends this field by exploring the ways in which the use of historical research within fiction illuminates the ways in which we remember and recreate the past.
Using the framework of postmemory to consider the evolutionary development of historiographical metafiction, Alden provides a ground-breaking analysis of the nature and potential of contemporary historical fiction, and the relationship between postmemory and ‘the real’. As well as asking how postmemory can unlock the significance of the transgenerational aspects of these novels, this study also analyses how authors use historical research in their work and demonstrates, on a very concrete level, the ways in which we remember and recreate the past. Tracing the ‘translation’ of source material as it moves from historical record to historical fiction, Alden offers a taxonomy of the uses of the past in contemporary historical fiction, analysing the ways in which authors adopt, adapt, appropriate, elide, augment, edit and transpose elements found such material. Asking to what extent such writing is, necessarily metafictional, and what motivates the decisions these novelists make about their use of the past, the study offers an updated answer to the question historical fiction has always posed: what can fiction do with history that history cannot?