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Reviewed by:
  • A Political Companion to James Baldwin ed. by Susan J. McWilliams
  • Douglas Field
Ed. Susan J. McWilliams. A Political Companion to James Baldwin. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2017. 426 pp. $80.00.

In "The Price of the Ticket," James Baldwin briefly recalls his Trotskyite years in the 1940s, recalling that he was a member of the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL). Baldwin's tantalizing reference to his political past is brushed aside by the writer, who claims, "[m]y life on the Left is of absolutely no interest. It did not last long. It was useful in that I learned that it may be impossible to indoctrinate me." As Susan J. McWilliams points out in the introduction to A Political Companion to James Baldwin, despite Baldwin's reluctance to identify with one or other political camp, [End Page 112] he emerges as "not just one of the nation's most important thinkers on matters of racial consciousness and injustice but also one of our most articulate theorists of democratic life" (6). Baldwin's work, McWilliams observes, points to "the interconnectedness of all our lives," as well as "an essential commitment to the idea that bearing witness to other human beings is a central political responsibility, and in striving to meet that responsibility we give ourselves the best chance of transformation or even salvation" (9).

Across fourteen chapters, the essays in A Political Companion to James Baldwin, written by established and emerging scholars, examine the writer as activist, citizen, and democratic theorist, as well as reading his work against the civil rights movement, religion, homosexuality, and women's liberation. In "'A Most Disagreeable Mirror': Race Consciousness as Double Consciousness," Lawrie Balfour reads Baldwin against W. E. B. Du Bois's notion of double consciousness, exploring Baldwin's polyphonic voice in essays such as "Many Thousands Gone," where the writer's use of "we" provides "moments of keen insight into the psychological burdens and the moral and political implications—for all citizens—of living with the color line" (31-32). In "The Race of a More Perfect Union: James Baldwin, Segregated Memory, and the Presidential Race," P. J. Brendese argues that the writer's "insights illuminate and counter a willful innocence about the complex legacy of segregated memory in American politics in general, and the [Obama] presidential race in particular" (50). Drawing on the work of Balfour and George Shulman, Brendese recuperates Baldwin as an invaluable theorist of the role of race in American political life, just as Susan J. McWilliams in "James Baldwin and the Politics of Disconnection" points out that "[y]ears before it was common to talk about 'social construction' … Baldwin became one of social construction's greatest theorists" (100). Baldwin's complexity is explored by Nicholas Buccola in "What William F. Buckley Jr. Did Not Understand about James Baldwin: On Baldwin's Politics of Freedom," which focuses on the debate between Buckley and Baldwin at the Cambridge Union Society in 1965. Buccola rightly points out that Baldwin's suspicion of ideology was "applied across the political spectrum" (121) but nonetheless offered keen insights into the notions of freedom and liberty. As George Shulman points out in "Baldwin, Prophecy, and Politics," he is rarely recognized "as a political thinker or even contributing to the understanding of politics" (151). By focusing on his prophetic tradition, Shulman explores the ways in which Baldwin's religiosity is deeply connected to his personal political practice.

While the majority of the essays collected focus on Baldwin's essays, in "Go Tell it on the Mountain: James Baldwin and the Politics of Faith," Wilson Carey McWilliams provides an insightful close reading of Baldwin's first novel in order to illuminate how the author's religious past informs his views on identity and the importance of love, a neglected theme that nonetheless courses through his fiction and nonfiction. In "The Negative Political Theology of James Baldwin," Vincent Lloyd also explores the importance of love in the writer's work by arguing that the writer "transformed, rather than rejected, his father's Christianity" (172).

Drawing on Cornel West's book Democracy Matters, in "Socrates in a Different Key: James Baldwin and Race in America...

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