The central figure in black gay literary history, James Baldwin has become a familiar touchstone for queer scholarship in the academy. Matt Brim’s James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination draws on the contributions of queer theory and black queer studies to critically engage with and complicate the project of queering Baldwin and his work. Brim argues that Baldwin animates and, in contrast, disrupts both the black gay literary tradition and the queer theoretical enterprise that have claimed him. More paradoxically, even as Baldwin’s fiction brilliantly succeeds in imagining queer intersections of race and sexuality, it simultaneously exhibits striking queer failures, whether exploiting gay love or erasing black lesbian desire. Brim thus argues that Baldwin’s work is deeply marked by ruptures of the “unqueer” into transcendent queer thought—and that readers must sustain rather than override this paradoxical dynamic within acts of queer imagination.

View the Table of Contents Read the Introduction.This excellent volume conceives of Baldwin as a figure crucial to discussions of whiteness, sexuality, and globalization. The times are ripe for the valuable reconsideration of Baldwin that James Baldwin Now provides.--Jennifer DeVere Brody,George Washington UniversityOne of the most prolific and influential African American writers, James Baldwin was for many a harbinger of hope, a man who traversed the genres of art-writing novels, essays, and poetry.James Baldwin Now takes advantage of the latest interdisciplinary work to understand the complexity of Baldwin's vision and contributions without needing to name him as exclusively gay, expatriate, black, or activist. It was, in fact, Baldwin who said, it is quite impossible to write a worthwhile novel about a Jew or a Gentile or a Homosexual, for people refuse... to function in so neat and one-dimensional a fashion. McBride has gathered a unique group of new scholars to interrogate Baldwin's life, his presence, and his political thought and work. James Baldwin Now finally addresses the man who spoke, and continues to speak, so eloquently to crucial issues of the twentieth century.Table of ContentsIntroduction: How Much Time Do You Want for Your Progress? New Approaches to James Baldwin Dwight A. McBridePart I: Baldwin and Race1 White Fantasies of Desire: Baldwin and the Racial Identities of SexualityMarlon B. Ross2 Now More Than Ever: James Baldwin and the Critique of White LiberalismRebecca Aanerud 3 Finding the Words: Baldwin, Race Consciousness, and Democratic TheoryLawrie BalfourPart II: Baldwin and Sexuality4 Culture, Rhetoric, and Queer Identity: James Baldwin and the Identity Politics of Race and Sexuality William J. Spurlin5 Of Mimicry and (Little Man Little) Man: Toward a Queersighted Theory of Black Childhood Nicholas Boggs6 Sexual Exiles: James Baldwin and Another Country James A. DievlerPart III: Baldwin and the Transatlantic7 Baldwin's Cosmopolitan Loneliness James Darsey8 Alas, Poor Richard!: Transatlantic Baldwin, the Politics of Forgetting, and the Project of Modernity Michelle M. Wright9 The Parvenu Baldwin and the Other Side of Redemption: Modernity, Race, Sexuality, and the Cold War Roderick A. FergusonPart IV: Baldwin and Intertextuality10 (Pro)Creating Imaginative Spaces and Other Queer Acts: Randall Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits and Its Revival of James Baldwin's Absent Black Gay Man in Giovanni's Room Sharon Patricia Holland11 I'm Not Entirely What I Look Like: Richard Wright,James Baldwin, and the Hegemony of Vision; or, Jimmy's FBEye BluesMaurice Wallace12 Life According to the Beat: James Baldwin, Bessie Smith, and the Perilous Sounds of LoveJosh KunPart V: Baldwin and the Literary13 The Discovery of What It Means to Be a Witness: James Baldwin's Dialectics of Difference Joshua L. Miller14 Selfhood and Strategy in Notes of a Native Son Lauren Rusk15 Select Bibliography of Works by and on James Baldwin Jeffrey W. HoleContributors Index

Of Latitudes Unknown is a multi-faceted study of James Baldwin's radical imagination. It is a selective and thoughtful survey that re-investigates the grounds of Baldwin studies and provides new critical approaches, subjects, and orientations for Baldwin criticism. This volume joins recent critical collections in “un-fragmenting” Baldwin and establishing further conjunctions in his work: the essay and the novel; the polemical and the aesthetic; his use of and participation in visual forms; and his American as well as international identities. But it goes beyond other recent studies by focusing on new entities of Baldwin's radical imagination: his English and French language selves; his late encounters with Africa; his appearances on French television and interviews with French journalists; and his unrecognized literary journalism. Of Latitudes Unknown also addresses Baldwin's relations with the Arab world, his anticipation of contemporary film and media studies, and his paradoxical public intellectualism. As it reassesses Baldwin's contributions to and influences on world literary history, Of Latitudes Unknown equally explores why the critical appreciation of Baldwin's writing continues to flourish, and why it remains a vast territory whose parts lie open to much deeper exploration and elaboration.

This Companion offers fresh insight into the art and politics of James Baldwin, one of the most important writers and provocative cultural critics of the twentieth century. Black, gay, and gifted, he was hailed as a 'spokesman for the race', although he personally, and controversially, eschewed titles and classifications of all kinds. Individual essays examine his classic novels and nonfiction as well as his work across lesser-examined domains: poetry, music, theatre, sermon, photo-text, children's literature, public media, comedy, and artistic collaboration. In doing so, The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin captures the power and influence of his work during the civil rights era as well as his relevance in the 'post-race' transnational twenty-first century, when his prescient questioning of the boundaries of race, sex, love, leadership, and country assume new urgency.

A novel approach to understanding the work of James Baldwin and its transformative potential The relationship of James Baldwin's life and work to Black religion is in many ways complex and confounding. What is he doing through his literary deployment of religious language and symbols? Despite Baldwin's disavowal of Christianity in his youth, he continued to engage the symbols and theology of Christianity in works such as The Amen Corner, Just Above My Head, and others. With Jimmy's Faith, author Christopher W. Hunt shows how Baldwin's usage of those religious symbols both shifted their meaning and served as a way for him to build his own religious and spiritual vision. Engaging José Esteban Muñoz's theory of disidentification as a queer practice of imagination and survival, Hunt demonstrates the ways in which James Baldwin disidentifies with and queers Black Christian language and theology throughout his literary corpus. Baldwin's vision is one in which queer sexuality signifies the depth of love's transforming possibilities, the arts serve as the (religious) medium of knitting Black community together, an agnostic and affective mysticism undermines Christian theological discourse, "androgyny" troubles the gender binary, and the Black child signifies the hope for a world made new. In disidentifying with Christian symbols, Jimmy's Faith reveals how Baldwin imagines both religion and the world "otherwise," offering a model of how we might do the same for our own communities and ourselves.

A new reading of Virginia Woolf in the context of “long modernism.” In recent decades, Virginia Woolf’s contribution to literary history has been located primarily within a female tradition. Elizabeth Abel dislodges Woolf from her iconic place within this tradition to uncover her shadowy presence in other literary genealogies. Abel elicits unexpected echoes of Woolf in four major writers from diverse cultural contexts: Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, and W. G. Sebald. By mapping the wayward paths of what Woolf called “odd affinities” that traverse the boundaries of gender, race, and nationality, Abel offers a new account of the arc of Woolf’s career and the transnational modernist genealogy constituted by her elusive and shifting presence. Odd Affinities will appeal to students and scholars working in New Modernist studies, comparative literature, gender and sexuality studies, and African American studies.

In Poor Queer Studies Matt Brim shifts queer studies away from its familiar sites of elite education toward poor and working-class people, places, and pedagogies. Brim shows how queer studies also takes place beyond the halls of flagship institutions: in night school; after a three-hour commute; in overflowing classrooms at no-name colleges; with no research budget; without access to decent food; with kids in tow; in a state of homelessness. Drawing on the everyday experiences of teaching and learning queer studies at the College of Staten Island, Brim outlines the ways the field has been driven by the material and intellectual resources of those institutions that neglect and rarely serve poor and minority students. By exploring poor and working-class queer ideas and laying bare the structural and disciplinary mechanisms of inequality that suppress them, Brim jumpstarts a queer-class knowledge project committed to anti-elitist and anti-racist education. Poor Queer Studies is essential for all of those who care about the state of higher education and building a more equitable academy.

"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.

Never before available, the unexpurgated last interview with James Baldwin “I was not born to be what someone said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else, but by myself, and myself only.” When, in the fall of 1987, the poet Quincy Troupe traveled to the south of France to interview James Baldwin, Baldwin’s brother David told him to ask Baldwin about everything—Baldwin was critically ill and David knew that this might be the writer’s last chance to speak at length about his life and work. The result is one of the most eloquent and revelatory interviews of Baldwin’s career, a conversation that ranges widely over such topics as his childhood in Harlem, his close friendship with Miles Davis, his relationship with writers like Toni Morrison and Richard Wright, his years in France, and his ever-incisive thoughts on the history of race relations and the African-American experience. Also collected here are significant interviews from other moments in Baldwin’s life, including an in-depth interview conducted by Studs Terkel shortly after the publication of Nobody Knows My Name. These interviews showcase, above all, Baldwin’s fearlessness and integrity as a writer, thinker, and individual, as well as the profound struggles he faced along the way.