James Baldwin and Black Women’s Fiction

Uses of music, silence, complex sexuality and a resistance to terms for identity all find their way from James Baldwin to contemporary women writers. Gayl Jones, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Morrison put these strategies to new uses, turning their gaze away from Baldwin’s male interracial relationships, instead looking toward the limits and possibilities of intraracial female coalescence. Communities in their novels succeed or fail depending on their ability to make room for romantic relationships among women.