Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers between the Nation and the World

Introduction

Introduction Perhaps only someone who is outside the States realizes that it is impossible to get out. james baldwin1 On August 25, 1970, anthropologist Margaret Mead and writer James Baldwin met for the first time to have three recorded conversations , totaling more than seven hours of tape that, once transcribed, would compose the book A Rap on Race (1971). The Mead and Baldwin book is an amazing account documenting the meeting of two of the twentieth century’s most paradigmatic thinkers and cultural creators discussing the meaning of “race” in the United States and in the world. Yet it seems most important to say that A Rap on Race is also a documentation of miscommunication , oversimplification, and overstatement. In fact, a 1971 New York Times reviewer suggests that the book might have been better left unpublished: “Wisdom and baloney are as blither is to blather. . . . We’re all capable of it, but only some of us ever bother to publish it.”2 It is a slight understatement to say that the Times reviewer found very little of substance in the transcribed conversations. It is also rather telling that all David Leeming could muster up about the book in his nearly four-hundred-page Baldwin biography was to say, “A book by James Baldwin and Margaret Mead was bound to become a best seller.”3 2 / introduction Despite of what might be perceived as a failure of content perhaps resulting from the cult of personality surrounding Baldwin and Mead at the time, I believe it is no small accident that these two thinkers would “rap on race” and that the nation might listen. More than a gimmick, Baldwin and Mead’s conversation speaks to the longstanding conversation between black American writing and ethnographic writing. And much like A Rap on Race, the connection between black writers and ethnography is neither uncomplicated nor seamless. Sometimes the two—the racialized writer and the disciplinary form often used to create and account for “exotic others”—are inevitably at odds, rendering entirely different stories out of the same materials. For instance, in A Rap on Race Mead expresses that she is perplexed by Baldwin’s theory of the American experience , which he tells her he believes is specifically informed by a racial history only available to people born and living in the United States. Mead attempts to remedy her perplexity by suggesting to Baldwin that he should consider the condition of black Americans in relation to that of white South Africans (under apartheid) because both groups, according to her, make citizenship claims on countries in which they hold minority status. Although this was an interesting way for Mead to frame solidarity, Baldwin replies that such a comparison is “rather hideous” and that white South Africans might be better compared to white southerners in the United States due to what he perceives as their shared investment in white superiority and racial inequity.4 Mead’s “hideous” comparisons aside, the juxtaposition of an anthropologist and a black writer seems to affirm the presumption that it is the job of black writers to report on their race/culture to a mainstream/white audience. Even if there is this presumption that black writers report, I would like to suggest that Mead and Baldwin’s exchanges help to illuminate the intervention that black American writers might make into the “hybrid activity” whose principal function has been “orientation”5 and whose historical impulse has been an attempt to make cultural introduction / 3 generalizations. Baldwin may be on the stage to report on black culture and to represent black people, but that does not mean he is confined to a particular script or mode of representation. His is an intervention that simultaneously relies on his proximity to and distance from black culture and American culture in order to tell the story of American racial realities. But Mead and Baldwin’s recorded conversations were not as novel as one might be inclined to believe. Since the early part of the twentieth century, well-known black writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Sterling Brown6 were making use of ethnographic techniques in the creation of both fiction and traditional ethnographies that portrayed and analyzed black life and culture. As Daphne Lamothe notes, the manipulation of the ethnographic encounter allowed many early twentieth-century black writers to enact a “paradoxical Black modernist gaze that look...