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4. “Now Describing You”. James Baldwin and Cold War Liberalism
- University of Michigan Press
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four “Now Describing You” James Baldwin and Cold War Liberalism vaughn rasberry In 1950, W. E. B. Du Bois’s literary journal Phylon devoted a special issue to the situation of the “Negro Writer.” Overwhelmingly, contributors noted how black writers appeared to be approaching artistic maturity and ‹nally shedding what Alain Locke described as the “adolescence” and “lingering immaturity” of the Negro Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s. Several titles in the issue echo this judgment: Charles H. Nichols Jr. describes the 1940s as “a Decade of Growth”; N. P. Tillman reads postwar black literary production as an entrance into the “Threshold of Maturity”; Thomas D. Jarrett heralds the “Negro Novelist’s Coming of Age” as a graduation “Toward Unfettered Creativity.” Commentators observed that the increasing number of literary texts ostensibly uncommitted to racial protest or naturalistic representation furnished further proof of the coming of age of the black novelist. “The most heartening thing for me,” writes Langston Hughes in Phylon, “is to see Negroes writing works in the general American ‹eld, rather than dwelling on Negro themes solely. . . . I have been pleased to see [Willard] Motley, [Frank] Yerby, [Ann] Petry, and Dorothy West presenting in their various ways non-Negro subjects. . . . Until this particular period there have not been so many Negroes writing of characters not drawn from their own race.”1 In the next several years, James Baldwin would publish the novels Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Another Country (1962), joining a distinguished group of black writers who had inaugurated 84 a new genre or at least rehabilitated a marginal one: the so-called novel of white life. Widely seen as literary evidence of black political progress, the proliferation of this and other experimental genres at midcentury suggested to many commentators the prospect for an unprecedented realm of freedom now open to African American writers. Critics argued that the slow but irreversible decline of Jim Crow segregation by midcentury had liberated African American writers from the racial protest genre, empowering them to pursue modes of “universal” expression that resonated with the national experience “as a whole.” Yet is this notion—that black writers and artists at midcentury sought to transcend racial particularism in favor of a nonracial universalism or “broader” national narrative—a viable way of understanding the shift in postwar African American aesthetics? Discussing a recent retrospective on the work of black artist Jacob Lawrence, Nikhil Pal Singh observes how the museum catalog highlights his mid-1950s series, “Struggle . . . From the History of the American People,” as a work in which Lawrence “went beyond African American history to deal with the American experience as a whole.” Such a description, he writes, “is characteristic in the history of black arts and letters.” “It suggests that universal expression or representation in art or social thought necessarily transcends what is an implicitly narrow racial or minority experience.”2 Similarly critical of the idea of racial transcendence as the prerequisite for universality, this chapter delineates Baldwin’s navigation of the cultural and political milieu of the Cold War in order to suggest an alternative reading and historical logic of a period that, to echo Hughes, did produce an extraordinary quantity of black-authored narratives about white subjectivities . But in contrast to accounts that read these narratives as an index of black artistic maturation or as a capitulation to what Thomas Schaub calls the “liberal narrative”3 of the Cold War, this chapter will argue that Baldwin ’s intellectual energies in this period embody the anticolonial zeitgeist encapsulated in his observation: “We who have been described so often are now describing [you].”4 Reconstructing his Cold War milieu—which encompasses the global anticolonial and Civil Rights movements, the onset of centrist liberalism, and the calamities of the Second World War—reveals Baldwin as not only a singular voice on “America” or the “Negro problem,” but an indispensable analyst of what Alain Badiou, with mock solemnity, calls the “totalitarian century,” the apocalyptic site of ghastly twentiethcentury events that can be thought principally in terms of organized state “Now Describing You” 85 [107.23.157.16] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:20 GMT) crime. As Badiou puts it, and as Baldwin was all too aware, “[The twentieth] century is an accursed century.” “The principal parameters for thinking it,” writes Badiou, “are the extermination camps, the gas chambers, massacres, tortures and organized state crime. . . . The union of this real with state crime has a name: this century is the totalitarian century.”5 Updating Arendt...