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This article examines James Baldwin’s late text The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985) as one of his substantial attempts at “forging a new language,” which he tentatively mentions in his late essays and interviews. As an unpopular and difficult text in Baldwin’s oeuvre, Evidence carries the imprint of a new economy of time, casting the past into the present, and a new economy of space, navigating across other geographies in appraising the serial killings of children in one of Atlanta’s poorest Black neighborhoods. This article suggests that a new economy of time emerges earlier in No Name in the Street (1972), as a result of Baldwin’s self-imposed exile in Europe. The article then analyzes his spatiotemporal logic in the specifics of Evidence with reference to a Black middle class, urbanization, the ghetto, gentrification, and other colonized spaces.
democracy. Reasonable debate – no matter how contentious and conflictual – is not only tolerable but desirable. In the west this emergence is generally understood to be a late-eighteenth-century phenomenon. 7 In British Guiana a newly dynamic public sphere starts to appear after emancipation in 1838. Nigel Westmaas offers a number of reasons for this development, including the appearance of the first Black newspaper (the Freeman Sentinel ), technological advancements in printing in the colonies, and the rise of a new Black middle class, especially in the later decades
acculturated black middle class reproduce these power relations when they speak French to express their class position and use Créole to address their servants. This mode of address – be it employed by the acculturated middle class or by the French white – is vexing and manifestly racist. As Fanon writes: To make [the black man] talk pidgin is to fasten him to the effigy of him, to snare him, to imprison him, the eternal victim of an essence, of an appearance for which he is not responsible … speaking pidgin-nigger closes off the black man; it perpetuates a state of conflict
Simeon Nduka in the 1930s, when ‘to throw a white man was like unmasking an ancestral spirit’ (NLE, 65), to Mr Green, senior civil servant in the late 1950s, forced unwillingly to accommodate the rights of the new black middle class. By stark contrast, as I have suggested however, the Umuofia of the first part of Things Fall Apart is styled very deliberately as a pre-lapserian space, before the work of cultural hybridisation has begun. While a succession of historians from Flora Shaw to Adielo Afigbo would describe the different phases of entrepreneurial and more
‘class’ and ‘gender’ need to be competing as categories: they will only do so if the question of identity assumes precedence or if, as Joyce argues, factors such as race, gender, class, etc., complement each other as though they were stable entities that could be summoned to explain and/or create that individual identity. It is not helpful to weigh up factors, as if they were fixed, pre-existing determinants, in order to work out exactly how an individual fits into a grid of identity formation – white working-class man; upper-class white woman; black middle-class man
. Continuing through the 1980s and 1990s in debates concerning radical changes in welfare policy and in new attention to the legacy of slavery, and in the 2000s with attention to the growth of a black middle class, public scrutiny has continued unabated throughout the period we examine. As one scholar puts it, ‘No system of family relations has received as much scholarly and public attention … as that of the African American family’ (K. Anderson, 1991: 259). Repeatedly linked to issues of national welfare, black family relations have been pathologized but sometimes extolled
, generally through a mission school) meant that the student entered into a black, middle-class elite, which provided a certain kind of privilege, but also potentially entailed compromises and complexities of class and race. Secondly, while Abrahams's liberal humanism, at least in its formation, was based upon Christian principles, Jacobson's is strictly secular. Thirdly, one of the most marked differences between Abrahams and Jacobson is that while Abrahams was critiqued for his espousal of liberal humanism by contemporaries and critics, Jacobson's liberalism was largely