Literature and Theatre
Volume 10’s From the Field section consists of provocations and talking points from roundtable discussions on the Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley film I Heard It Through the Grapevine (1982) hosted by James Baldwin Review at three different conferences—the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Denver in 2023; the Modern Language Association’s 2024 conference in Philadelphia; and the American Literature Association’s 2024 conference in Chicago. These roundtables provided stimulating public conversation, bringing together scholars to provide new takes on this extraordinary but little-known film. The panelists—Simon Abramowitsch (Chabot College), Douglas Field (University of Manchester), Monika Gehlawat (University of Southern Mississippi), Melanie Hill (Rutgers University), Josslyn J. Luckett (NYU), D. Quentin Miller (Suffolk University), Jared O’Connor (University of Illinois at Chicago), Hayley O’Malley (Rice University), Robert Reid-Pharr (NYU), Karen Thorsen (independent filmmaker), Kenneth Stuckey (Bentley University)—have each agreed to share here their opening remarks from these conferences in hopes of furthering discussion on this vital film.
This book argues that the queer potential of keeping relationships as demonstrated in the first chapter allows readers to reconsider what these Victorian authors are doing with characters whom conventional narrative does not accommodate. In addition to looking at the cultural work that authors perform using explicit mistress characters, the book offers ways to read for kept women when they seem to be absent from narrative, and find experiences for them that do not necessarily shore up the myth of heterosexual marriage. In this way, this project addresses the relationship between readers and authors, via the intermediary figures of kept women characters. The book encourages an active readership, and ways of seeing, and models of connection entailing a queer, ethical compassion. This reading encourages possibility for women and identities excluded from, yet bearing the weight of, conventional narrative. Such readings can appreciate narrative techniques employed by various writers, many who themselves lived beyond convention, and offer strategies for reading other seemingly exclusive texts. Thus in its reconsideration of Victorian literature, this study presents a way towards Susan S. Lanser’s “narrative justice” for kept women characters, women who choose to survive and resist in a world that acts against them. Readers can be active in offering the care work for nineteenth-century women, and women and other disprivileged people today. These Victorian narratives offer queer possibilities of destabilization, allowing readers to recognize the political potential in connections of labor, love, and space, as well as the pleasure in doing so.
James Baldwin Review is delighted to present a special section dedicated to chronicling and demonstrating Baldwin’s direct involvement in the civil rights movement. On tours for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1962–63, Baldwin spoke at dozens of forums. We have transcribed three of his major appearances on May 7, 1963: a speech before a packed gathering of thousands of students at the University of California at Berkeley; a radio interview with John Leonard and Elsa Knight Thompson; and an evening speech before the sold-out San Francisco Masonic Temple. Ed Pavlić provides an introduction tracing some of Baldwin’s work for CORE in new detail. These details suggest that Baldwin’s activism enriched his life and work in contrast to the prevailing idea that these engagements threatened and diminished his art.
This conversation was first broadcast on KPFA (Berkeley, CA) on June 6, 1963. Original transcription available online: https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-28-8s4jm23q52. The transcription below has been lightly edited for clarity and prepared by Ed Pavlić and Justin A. Joyce. Vocal emphasis has been captured with italics. Significant pauses, interruptions, or non-word interjections have been captured in editorial brackets.
This chapter focuses on counter-mapping as an instrument of power in colonial and Indigenous Arctic contexts. The North in its entirety is a colonial territory, where decolonial initiatives have arisen in various places. Among these, several are rooted in mapping; cartography has been forced upon the land in such violent ways that the only way forward is to overthrow the practice itself. Analysing cartography implies above all examining the conventions that permit the transformation of the land into an abstract entity, as well as the values that underlie its cultural portrayal; and cartographic reversals are acts of resistance to settler colonialism. Drawing on Indigenous conceptions of mapping alongside postrepresentational approaches to cartography, this chapter analyses counter-mapping initiatives from across the circumpolar world: Sámi artist Elle-Hánsa/Hans Ragnar Mathisen/Keviselie’s maps of Sápmi; the linguistic reversal work of the Nunavik Nunatop project; contemporary transformations of Greenland through cartographic art and spatial practice; and, finally, Norwegian artist Tomas Ramberg’s cartographic critique of the Norwegian petrostate. In each of these cases, cartography is used as a cultural and political tool. These counter-mapping projects credit aesthetics with the ability to redefine spatial perceptions and, consequently, to act upon issues related to power dynamics. Through reversals and shifts in perspectives, they account for the diversity of geographic and cultural spaces in the Arctic. Our analyses thereby reveal that decolonial mapping is not primarily about finished products but rather about cartographic processes that tell stories, imagine restorative justice, and assert Indigenous sovereignty.