Possible Futures and Grammatical Politics in James Baldwin’s Another Country

James Baldwin’s Another Country (1962) reflects his engagement in the turmoil of the American present and the uncertainty of its future. Yet the novel’s characters never find the racial and sexual justice they are looking for within the confines of the plot. Instead, Baldwin gestures toward a potentially utopian world of human connection at a linguistic level, within brief passages of adventurous prose that wed modality as a grammatical register with the political and affective domain of what-might-be. Another Country’s fleeting utopian moments imbue the novel with the sense that an American future untethered from racial oppression and sexual alienation is possible, but not assured. Within the context of a novel written specifically to illuminate real historical conditions in mid-twentieth-century United States, at the height of the civil rights movement, Baldwin’s grammatical experimentation makes language the site of social protest.