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The author discusses his personal relationship with James Baldwin, recounting their collaboration on a film script for an adaptation of Giovanni’s Room.
“Rebranding James Baldwin and His Queer Others” was a session held at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association in November 2019 in Honolulu, Hawaii. The papers gathered here show how Baldwin’s writings and life story participate in dialogues with other authors and artists who probe issues of identity and identification, as well as with other types of texts and non-American stories, boldly addressing theoretical and political perspectives different from his own. Nick Radel’s temporal challenge to reading novels on homoerotic male desire asks of us a leap of faith, one that makes it possible to read race as not necessarily a synonym for “Black,” but as a powerful historical and sexual trope that resists “over-easy” binaries of Western masculinity. Ernest L. Gibson’s engagement with Beauford Delaney’s brilliant art and the ways in which it enabled the teenage Baldwin’s “dark rapture” of self-discovery as a writer reminds us that “something [has been missing] in our discussions of male relationships.” Finally, Nigel Hatton suggests “a relationship among Baldwin, Denmark, and Giovanni’s Room that adds another thread to the important scholarship on his groundbreaking work of fiction that has impacted African-American literature, Cold War studies, transnational American studies, feminist thought, and queer theory.” All three essays enlarge our assessment of Baldwin’s contribution to understanding the ways gender and sexuality always inflect racialized Western masculinities. Thus, they help us work to better gauge the extent of Baldwin’s influence right here and right now.
This essay’s close interrogation of James Baldwin’s 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room allows us to see one aspect of how sexual shame functions: it shows how shame exposes anxiety not only about the feminizing force of homosexuality, but about how being the object of the gaze is feminizing—and therefore shameful. It also shows that the paradigm of the closet is not the metaphor of privacy and enclosure on one hand and openness and liberation on the other that it is commonly thought to be, but instead is a site of illusory control over whether one is available to be seen and therefore humiliated by being feminized. Further, the essay reveals the paradox of denial, where one must first know the thing that is at the same time being disavowed or denied. The narrative requirements of fictions such as Giovanni’s Room demonstrate this, as it requires that the narrator both know, in order to narrate, and not know something at the same time.
Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work (1976) has proven challenging since its publication because readers and critics have trouble classifying it. The challenge may be related to a common feature of Baldwin criticism, namely a tendency to compare late career works to early ones and to find them lacking: the experimental nature of later works of nonfiction like No Name in the Street (1972), The Devil Finds Work, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985) does not square easily with the more conventional essays that made Baldwin famous in his early years. I attempt to reframe The Devil Finds Work not through a comparison to other Baldwin essays, but rather through a comparison to his fiction, specifically the novel Giovanni’s Room. I posit that a greater appreciation for Devil can result from thinking of it as a story, specifically the story of a failed love affair.
within a longer history of gay writing. It reflects what Pearl describes as ‘a preexisting link, not only between gay men and death, but between gay men and loss, disappointment, and grief ’. She cites, as examples, Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and Christopher ‘Who are you? What the fuck are you doing here?’ 183 Isherwood’s A Single Man, as well as more recent texts such as A Boy’s Own Story and The Lost Language of Cranes.37 While Caserio claims that ‘homosexual desire, in contrast [to heterosexuality], stands at a
Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room , Another Country and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone were silenced and passed unnoticed. Some of them came to the Russian reader in Brezhnev’s era (late 1970s to early 1980s), during Perestroika and in the post-Soviet period together with the new generation of African-American writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Gloria Nailor – and helped to restore the landscape of black American prose as much more versatile, rich and multifaceted than early depictions of black
, White Masks , which appeared in 1952; the essays and fiction of James Baldwin, most particularly his essay ‘Stranger in the Village’ (1953) and his novel Giovanni’s Room (1956); and Richard Wright’s polemical White Man, Listen! , published in 1957. 5 In this chapter, however, I am taking a narrower perspective, principally exploring Wright