James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Reagan Era by Joseph Vogel, and: Me and My House: James Baldwin's Last Decade in France by Magdalena J. Zaborowska (review)

For many years the work that James Baldwin produced in his late career was critically devalued as a great tailing-off in quality from the extraordinary writing he produced from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. A wide range of critics and scholars complained that novels such as Just Above My Head and nonfiction work like The Evidence of Things Unseen suffered from excessive personal bitterness and ideological rigidity that deflated the rich complexity of his best writing. Others felt that Baldwin had lost touch with the main currents of late twentieth-century American life and was simply repeating themes from previous books.

In recent years, however, there has been a revival of interest in Baldwin. African American Review published a special number on Baldwin in their Winter 2013 issue and the James Baldwin Review was established a year later. A series of important book-length studies followed in quick succession, including Douglas Field's All These Strangers (2015), Ed Pavlić's Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music (2016) and Michele Elam's edited collection The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin (2015). Baldwin's uncollected essays, The Cross of Redemption, was published in 2010 and Raoul Peck's celebrated Oscar-nominated documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, had a successful run at the box office before airing on PBS, broadening the base of interest in Baldwin to include new audiences. YouTube has also made available many interviews with him from the 1950s and '60s.

James Vogel and Magdalena Zaborowska make strong contributions to this remarkable renaissance of Baldwin studies by carefully examining the work he produced in the last decades of his life. Vogel argues convincingly that Baldwin in the 1980s "felt reinvigorated" (10) and was "profoundly engaged" (138) in important cultural issues that resonate powerfully to the present day. Zaborowska, likewise, regards Baldwin's late works as rooted in a "fierce creativity" (39), which enabled him to pursue exciting, fresh directions that resulted in new work of the highest quality.

Zaborowska points out that by the 1980s Baldwin fell "out of favor with American cultural elites on both sides of the proverbial color line" (19) and this resulted in his being unfairly labeled and dismissed. Meanwhile, Vogel makes a strong case that Baldwin's writing in the Reagan era was "razor-sharp" (2) and remains "both vital and urgent" (18) for us today. Demonstrating that Baldwin is "one of the most prescient observers of the post-civil rights landscape" (2), Vogel astutely analyzes particular late works in terms of political, social, and cultural issues that resonate to the present. As a result, he regards Baldwin as "not only "relevant but also prophetic" (114).

For example, Vogel connects The Welcome Table not only to the AIDS epidemic that raged in the 1980s but also to the contemporary LGBTQ movement. Baldwin's last published essay, "To Crush the Serpent," is examined as a revealing analysis of the religious right that continues to play such a destructive role in American politics. As Vogel observes, "Born-again Christianity not only shaped the 1980s[,] it changed America in ways that are still being felt today" (96). The Evidence of Things Unseen, which he views as Baldwin's "most overlooked book" (115), probes the child killings that terrified Atlanta in the 1980s, but it can also be seen as a "prophetic" (114) book that can help us understand the police killings of young black men that contributed to the creation of the Black Lives Matter movement. He stresses that the wave of racial violence in Atlanta anticipates "the 'post-racial' violence that continued in the Obama era" (117) and beyond because in both periods black lives are considered as...