Physical Sympathy: Hip and Sentimentalism in James Baldwin's Another Country

Despite James Baldwin's seeming antipathy towards sentimentalism, his novel Another Country reveals a profound investment in the political and aesthetic significance of authentic feeling. Mediating between the models of sympathetic identification found in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Norman Mailer's "The White Negro," Baldwin articulates a model of sympathetic identification as a form of passivity in which we receive the experiences of another not by inhabiting other's bodies, but by allowing other bodies, and the pain those bodies have endured, to enter into our own.