Overview

The “James Baldwin’s American Scene” seminar, taught by Professor Jacqueline Goldsby, examines Baldwin’s self-declared role as “witness” to America’s struggle to achieve racial justice. Through discussions of Baldwin’s essays and novels on the “American scene” from the 1940s to the 1980s, the course traces the trajectories of Baldwin’s fiction’s social concerns alongside his emergence as a path-breaking writer/thinker on American racial politics, culture, and literary aesthetics. Why, for Baldwin, did racial equality hinge on white and Black Americans being in “love” and open to sensual experience—and what kind of civil rights follow from Baldwin’s (homo)erotics of freedom? Baldwin’s religiosity was a burden and shield, a means and threat to his sense of self and voice; how does that ambivalence manifest in his writings, to make what arguments about the place of spirituality in American life? What are we to make of Baldwin’s unabashed allegorization of his personal and family history as national history, and what ethical claims do his works assert for both privacy’s and memory’s place in public life? And how should we understand a central paradox in Baldwin’s career: that his most trenchant critiques of the United States were written from abroad?

Students enrolled in “James Baldwin’s American Scene” engage with a wide variety of media: films, published print texts, art gallery exhibits, and digitized archival sources (manuscripts, photographs, and sound recordings). They also embrace new media platforms to communicate their critical understanding of Baldwin’s prose and politics. Through their digital work—text mining projects, podcasts, examinations of digitized manuscript materials, and visual critical essays created with ArcGIS StoryMaps—they offer innovative contributions to Baldwin scholarship and shed new light on his role in 20th-century literary and political history.

Student Work

“James Baldwin in the South,” by Kate Kushner ’21

James Baldwin’s participation in the modern civil rights movement occurred both on and off the page over many years of his career, and Baldwin used several of his writings to articulate his own vision of the artist’s role in the Black freedom struggle. The StoryMap “James Baldwin in the South” tracks Baldwin’s engagement with the 1960-1965 phase of the southern civil rights movement, combining maps, photographs, music, recorded interviews, quotes from Black newspapers, and excerpts from Baldwin’s writings to investigate how Baldwin went about implementing this vision in practice. While crafting a narrative out of these sources, this StoryMap also considers Baldwin’s ambivalence towards both the civil rights movement and the South.