Description:
Dwight McBride, the editor of this diverse and challenging new collection of James Baldwin scholarship, reports that at least 15 dissertations on Baldwin have appeared since 1990, suggesting that a revival may be taking place. That this should occur now, in the heyday of cultural studies, and among younger scholars, is especially promising for Baldwin, who has suffered since the publication of his first novel in 1953 (Go Tell It on the Mountain) by being relegated to one or another critical category. McBride notes, "It is finally possible to understand Baldwin's vision of and for humanity in its complexity, locating him not as exclusively gay, black, expatriate, activist, or the like but as an intricately negotiated amalgam of all of those things, which had to be constantly tailored to fit the circumstances in which he was compelled to articulate himself." Among the best essays here are the reception studies, William Spurlin's "Culture, Rhetoric, and Queer Identity: James Baldwin and the Identity Politics of Race and Sexuality," which focuses on Baldwin's position in the Black Power movement, including Eldridge Cleavor's famously homophobic reading of Baldwin, and Roderick A. Ferguson's elegantly readable "The Parvenu Baldwin and the Other Side of Redemption: Modernity, Race, Sexuality and the Cold War." --Regina Marler
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