| Description |
1 online resource (viii, 259 pages) : illustrations |
|
data file |
| Physical Medium |
polychrome |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Contents |
Stranger at home: James Baldwin on what it means to be an American / Cheryl A. Wall -- Baldwin and "the American confusion" / Colm Tc̳ib[MARC+96]n -- "Over and over and over again": James Baldwin, Uncle Tom's cabin, and the afterlife of an American story / Briallen Hopper -- "Now describing you": James Baldwin and Cold War liberalism / Vaughn Rasberry -- Baldwin, prophecy, and politics / George Shulman -- Rendezvous with life: reading early and late Baldwin / Robert Reid-Pharr -- "History's ass pocket": the sources of Baldwinian diaspora / Kevin Birmingham -- Separate and unequal in Paris: notes of a native son and the law / D. Quentin Miller -- Exile and the private life: James Baldwin, George Lamming, and the First World Congress of Negro Writers and Artists / Kevin Gaines -- From Istanbul to St. Paul-de-Vence: around James Baldwin's The welcome table / Magdalena Zaborowska -- What is Africa to Baldwin? cultural illegitimacy and the step-fatherland / Douglas Field -- James Baldwin and Chinua Achebe: transgressing official vocabularies / Eleanor W. Traylor. |
| Summary |
"This fine collection of essays represents an important contribution to the rediscovery of Baldwin's stature as essayist, novelist, black prophetic political voice, and witness to the Civil Rights era. The title provides an excellent thematic focus. He understood both the necessity, and the impossibility, of being a black 'American' writer. He took these issues 'Beyond'--Paris, Istanbul, various parts of Africa--but this formative experience only returned him to the unresolved dilemmas. He was a fine novelist and a major prophetic political voice. He produced some of the most important essays of the twentieth century and addressed in depth the complexities of the black political movement. His relative invisibility almost lost us one of the most significant voices of his generation. This welcome 'revival' retrieves it. Close call."--Stuart Hall, Professor Emeritus, Open University This interdisciplinary collection by leading writers in their fields brings together a discussion of the many facets of James Baldwin, both as a writer and as the prophetic conscience of a nation. The core of the volume addresses the shifting, complex relations between Baldwin as an American-"as American as any Texas GI" as he once wryly put it-and his life as an itinerant cosmopolitan. His ambivalent imaginings of America were always mediated by his conception of a world "beyond" America: a world he knew both from his travels and from his voracious reading. He was a man whose instincts were, at every turn, nurtured by America; but who at the same time developed a ferocious critique of American exceptionalism. In seeking to understand how, as an American, he could learn to live with difference-breaking the power of fundamentalisms of all stripes-he opened an urgent, timely debate that is still ours. His America was an idea fired by desire and grief in equal measure. As the authors assembled here argue, to read him now allows us to imagine new possibilities for the future. With contributions by Kevin Birmingham, Douglas Field, Kevin Gaines, Briallen Hopper, Quentin Miller, Vaughn Rasberry, Robert Reid-Pharr, George Shulman, Hortense Spillers, Colm Tóibín, Eleanor W. Traylor, Cheryl A. Wall, and Magdalena Zaborowska. |
| Local Note |
eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America |
| Subject |
Baldwin, James, 1924-1987 -- Criticism and interpretation.
|
|
Baldwin, James, 1924-1987. |
|
Criticism and interpretation. |
|
African Americans in literature.
|
|
African Americans in literature. |
| Genre/Form |
Electronic books.
|
|
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
|
| Added Author |
Kaplan, Cora.
|
|
Schwarz, Bill, 1951-
|
| Other Form: |
Print version: James Baldwin. Ann Arbor : The University of Michigan Press, ©2011 9780472071524 (DLC) 2011014831 (OCoLC)687681242 |
| ISBN |
9780472027613 (electronic book) |
|
0472027611 (electronic book) |
|
9786613334329 |
|
6613334324 |
|
9780472071524 |
|
0472071521 |
|
9780472051526 |
|
0472051520 |
|
