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This article illustrates the multi-generational influence of Baldwin’s The Evidence of Things Not Seen on my path as a Black scholar and draws connections between representation, identity, kinship, and the interdependence of Black writers in the fight for social justice. Through tracing Baldwin’s working relationship with my father, former editor of Playboy magazine Walter Lowe Jr., I hope to illuminate the relational underpinnings of Baldwin’s work on the Atlanta child murders, thereby foregrounding the complexities of Black life. This article recognizes Baldwin’s work in Evidence as more than just a new-wave logistical, strategic, textual model of resistance but also as a mode of artistic production arising from a tradition that is deeply felt, collaborative, improvisational, and ancestrally rooted.
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.
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.
The escalation of systematic, if random, violence in the contemporary world frames the concerns of the article, which seeks to read Baldwin for the present. It works by a measure of indirection, arriving at Baldwin after a detour which introduces Chinua Achebe. The Baldwin–Achebe relationship is familiar fare. However, here I explore not the shared congruence between their first novels, but rather focus on their later works, in which the reflexes of terror lie close to the surface. I use Achebe’s final novel, Anthills of the Savanah, as a way into Baldwin’s “difficult” last book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, suggesting that both these works can speak directly to our own historical present. Both Baldwin and Achebe, I argue, chose to assume the role of witness to the evolving manifestations of catastrophe, which they came to believe enveloped the final years of their lives. In order to seek redemption they each determined to craft a prose—the product of a very particular historical conjuncture—which could bring out into the open the prevailing undercurrents of violence and terror.
This essay argues for the importance of James Baldwin’s last house, located in St. Paul-de-Vence in the south of France, to his late works written during the productive period of 1971–87: No Name in the Street (1972), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), The Devil Finds Work (1976), Just Above My Head (1979), The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), and the unpublished play The Welcome Table (1987). That period ushered in a new Baldwin, more complex and mature as an author, who became disillusioned while growing older as a black queer American who had no choice but to live abroad to get his work done and to feel safe. Having established his most enduring household at “Chez Baldwin,” as the property was known locally, the writer engaged in literary genre experimentation and challenged normative binaries of race, gender, and sexuality with his conceptions of spatially contingent national identity. The late Baldwin created unprecedented models of black queer domesticity and humanism that, having been excluded from U.S. cultural narratives until recently, offer novel ways to reconceptualize what it means to be an American intellectual in the twenty-first-century world.
an illustration of what the engraver wishes he had done and has not done; of what he wishes would be, but which he well knows will not be, done. It is, in sad earnest, an exhibition of faith more than of works; for it is fairly covered by the theological definition – ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not
hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (Irvin G. Wyllie, The Self-Made Man in America: The Myth of Rags to Riches ) 1 Images of the toxic encroachment of the ‘age of the machine’ into pristine rural landscapes litter Cormac McCarthy’s first novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965). The opening section finds a ‘mangled fragment of fence’ embedded in the flesh of a rotting tree, and the aging orchard keeper, Arthur Ownby, haunts a peach orchard now ‘gray limb[ed]’ and abandoned, abutted to a concrete insecticide pit which is being used as a crypt for a murdered body
coin collection, with the blanks to be filled by the individual collector; the book’s greatest value is its record not of what is there, but of what is lacking: it is the reader’s coin collection now. But it also transforms the nature of the book as a testimony to the historical reality of material objects. The evidence Huttich’s missing heads provide is the evidence of things
let a little bit of truth check the rush of a big truth’ (172). Van Helsing refers not only to Mark Twain here, but also to Hebrews 11:1, ‘faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’, although he will subsequently emphasise that Seward and the other men must believe what they see , even if what they see defies belief. For Van Helsing, an open mind means believing in
news is finally heard, rather than seen, as true. The four pairs of rhymes move from the outward and visible world of phenomena to the inward world of faith, from unbelief to belief. The first two pairs of rhymes (tale/pail, seen/redeem) correspond to things merely seen and therefore not necessarily believable, whereas the second two (view/true, word/heard) enter the Christian world of hope through faith: ‘Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ 15 In addition, we need to understand that the poetic moment is like the