Literature and Theatre
This article presents a genealogy of James Baldwin’s novel Another Country through a series of archival manuscripts dating from 1944. It argues that the nearly two-decades writing process informs a central theme of Another Country: the painful self-knowledge that comes from self-confrontation. The article offers this explanation to complement other contemporary interpretations of this theme of self-knowledge, particularly those of Mikko Tuhkanen and E. J. Martínez.
Recent scholarship has clarified the centrality of psychoanalytic concepts like desire and the unconscious to James Baldwin’s major fiction and political essays, though it has not yet addressed his notable distaste for talk-based mental health care including clinical psychoanalysis. The writer’s complex position on psychoanalysis both reflected the prestige of clinical psychoanalysis at midcentury, and responded to white colleagues’ racist use of psychoanalytic concepts. His fiction and political essays also participated consequentially in a broader post-Freudian psychoanalytic discourse. Giovanni’s Room (1956) in particular engages significantly with prolific contemporary US analyst Edmund Bergler. Baldwin’s psychoanalysis was an attempt to seize Freudian conceptuality from reactionary, pro-normative institutions, and put it to work for human freedom, one that achieved partial success. Examining the full range of the writer’s psychoanalytic thought, including its contradictions, refines his intellectual biography.
Eulogy delivered at Baldwin’s funeral, along with those by Morrison and Angelou. Published in The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, ed. William J. Harris (Berkeley, CA, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), pp. 450–6.
Published in The New York Times, December 20, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 30, Column 2; Book Review Desk.
Tracing the journal’s history, Justin A. Joyce introduces the tenth anniversary volume of James Baldwin Review.
During an overloaded and intense western tour for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Baldwin spoke to an audience of over three thousand in the packed auditorium of the Masonic Temple on Mason Street in the Nob Hill section of San Francisco on May 7, 1963. The overwhelming size of the crowd at the Masonic Temple had delayed the start of Baldwin’s speech by an hour. Speaking that evening for a little over forty minutes, Baldwin delivered on his promise to script a confrontation between the worldview of his audiences and the fiercely present need for the country to change itself. To Baldwin this meant that his audiences must change themselves and, maybe even more profoundly, each other. The transcription below has been prepared by Ed Pavlić and Justin A. Joyce. Vocal emphasis has been captured with italics. Significant pauses, interruptions, and non-word interjections have been captured in editorial brackets. The recording of the speech can be found here: https://www.pacificaradioarchives.org/recording/bb0838.
Eulogy delivered at James Baldwin’s funeral. Published in The New York Times, December 20, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 27, Column 1; Book Review Desk.
Chapter 4 considers George Eliot’s use of Lydia Glasher and her story as central to Daniel Deronda. Eliot invites readers into the home of the kept woman, and demonstrates that it is remarkably like that of the proper Victorian wife, thereby challenging these very categories (and making a point Evans herself makes via her own lived experience). Unlike Nancy, Esther, and Ruth, Lydia triumphs in her novel: she actively uses both her presence and voice to secure resources, and ultimately an inheritance, for her children. This, plus the fact that she lives, is a happy ending for a kept woman. Readers can appreciate Lydia’s activity in the face of Grandcourt (a cruel keeper) and Gwendolen, who initially takes care of Lydia’s narrative, but then must act against her due to her own socioeconomic straits. Appreciating Lydia as a woman acting to secure not only her own keep, but the future of her children, is a way for readers to care for this character and her narrative.
The mediated Arctic charts emergent geographical imaginaries of the Arctic. In the twenty-first century, the Arctic has entered worldwide public discussion to an unprecedented extent in the context of climate change, global scrambles for resources, and new shipping lanes. Alongside this new hypervisibility in environmental, geopolitical, and economic debates, the last two decades have seen an explosion of fictional and artistic mediations of the Arctic. Responding to these trends, The mediated Arctic analyses twenty-first-century works that reimagine and remap the Arctic, whether through actual cartographic practice or through the geographical and spatial possibilities of literature, film, television, animation, comics, visual art, or hip hop. Taking a circumpolar approach, it enquires into the multiple relationships between the material and the medial, asking how elements of Arctic geography such as ice, rivers, wetlands, coastlines, and urban spaces are translated into aesthetic forms that carry political force. The authors thereby pay special attention to Indigenous cultural production alongside outside perspectives on the Arctic. While the ‘Arctic’ is a Southern invention steeped in colonial histories, it is increasingly claimed by Indigenous communities to denote circumpolar homelands, forge Northern alliances, and decolonise the spatial imagination. Grounded in extensive collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers from multiple disciplines and different epistemological traditions, this book is an essential contribution to our understanding of the transformative geographical force of words, images, and stories in a circumpolar context. Like the works it discusses, The mediated Arctic does not merely ‘describe’ the Arctic but takes part in its ongoing creation.