Introduction: On Baldwin and Philosophy

The point of this collection of essays on James Baldwin is, as it were, to not take the word on James Baldwin at its word. This collection does not seek to iterate, once again, the divisions—separating Baldwin’s work into distinct, discrete articulations such as those that have so marked critiques on Baldwin. James Baldwin, culminating in The Fire Next Time (this is always where the dividing line is drawn, The Fire Next Time), darling of the white liberal establishment with his essays in Partisan Review and Commentary—this Baldwin is the author who struggled with that metaphoric father, Richard Wright, the Marxist “naturalist” (and confrère of Sartre, de Beauvoir) and creator of the tragic Bigger Thomas, who had to be “slain” in order that “art” (for “arts sake,” of course) might triumph over the “protest novel.” The Baldwin, who, try as he might, could never quite bridge the gap with “Alas, Poor Richard,” the essay he penned after Wright’s death. That Baldwin is undone by the violent homophobia of Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, in which Baldwin is attacked relentlessly, for his homosexuality, for being, among other things, the “black boy, with a white mind”; the effect of Cleaver’s attacks, the logic goes, is that it “reduced” Baldwin to giving up his liberalist tendencies, his commitment to “art” for its own sake. As a consequence, Baldwin “apologized” to Cleaver, in part by revising, radically, his position on the Black Panthers by underwriting Cleaver’s and Huey Newton’s project. In this schema, everything that Baldwin writes after The Fire Next Time is either “bad literature” or outright pamphleteering—black nationalist “propaganda.”

There is a place in Baldwin scholarship for critiques and assessments of this kind, but that is not the thinking on Baldwin that this collection undertakes. The ambition here is, rather, to see where Baldwin’s Logos, his word, his word on race and racism, his word on film, his word on violence against African-Americans across the decades (indeed, the centuries), his word on love and religion, takes us. This collection engages Baldwin as a philosopher, as a thinker who raises fundamental questions, questions that go to the core of what it means to be in the world.

In a certain sense, this should not be a surprising turn in scholarship, considering his moment as a writer. Born in 1924, Baldwin belongs to a generation of black Atlantic thinkers who infused nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and theater with philosophical language and massive theoretical aspiration. Baldwin’s birth-moment puts him alongside that great anti-colonial cluster of West Indian writers, including Frantz Fanon, Kamau Brathwaite, Édouard Glissant, George Lamming, and Derek Walcott, inheritors, all of them, of that just-prior wave of anticolonial writing and struggle in the works of Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and C. L. R. James. These are legendary, world-historical thinkers, renowned for the challenge they put to European imperial power and the logic of colonialism as much as they anticipated the problems and, indeed, the disappointments that sovereignty would bring to fledgling Third World nations—and the sovereign nations to come. This is a cadre of thinkers to which Baldwin, in his own complicated way, belonged.

The birth-moment is also an intellectual event, an occasion in which an honest reckoning with the past seemed possible, one that might reject and surpass the abjection of the Africana past in the name of something simultaneously more syncretic, creolized, and more messianic. This is, as C. L. R. James might have insisted, a world-historical moment. For all of these thinkers, this moment was: revolutionary. Transformative. It was full of potentiality but already haunted by the specter of a failed to-come. Another future becomes possible in Baldwin’s work, just as it had become possible in the essays, poems, novels, and theoretical works of his black Atlantic contemporaries, drawing, always, on the complex richness of the painful, yet something more than just pain, history, and the memory of black people. Such a moment and its...