Front matter

James Baldwin

Index

Introduction

James Baldwin Theory—Seeing the Invisible

At its best, queer theory has always also been something else—something that will be left out of any purely intellectual history of the movement.

— MICHAEL WARNER, “QUEER AND THEN? THE END OF QUEER THEORY?”

Thus lesbianism, homosexuality, and the societies we form cannot be thought of or spoken of, even though they have always existed. . . . [W ]hen thought by the straight mind, homosexuality is nothing but heterosexuality.

—MONIQUE WITTIG, “THE STRAIGHT MIND” AND OTHER ESSAYS

What one can and cannot see says something about you.

—JAMES BALDWIN, QUOTED IN DAVID LEEMING, JAMES BALDWIN: A BIOGRAPHY

‘The central figure in black gay literary history, James Baldwin has been made a standard-bearer for queer culture. Baldwin is a queer touchstone within the university as well, especially in the field of queer theory. As a totem figure for this notoriously rowdy discipline, Baldwin nevertheless often functions as a surprisingly untroubled queer signifier. This study will explore the paradoxes of Baldwin's queer exemplarity, an intervention made possible because Baldwin has been productively re-viewed, renewed, renamed, and reclaimed as a queer object of study over the last two decades. That queering has produced a corresponding shift—a “Baldwinization’” of queer theory in the form of black queer studies—that has sharpened, darkened, “quared,’ and repaired the field. But if queer theory has in some ways risen to the challenges of Baldwin, how has it also failed to do so? In turn, what new problems can queer theory pose for Baldwin and his work? And what are

Brim, Matt. James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6975932 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor the consequences of reformulating these queer relations? These are the driving concerns of James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination.

Without much using the word and without the benefit of the theory that would later be constructed around it, James Baldwin imagined much of what theorists mean these days when we use the word “queer.” Baldwin, working with and beyond prescribed identity categories, takes as his most enduring subject precisely those illegitimized desires, often between men and often between races, that have been pushed to the very edge of the thinkable and there, inevitably, gripped the erotic unconscious. Queer theory, in part, names the enterprise devoted to the analytical and scholarly reimagining of just such “impossible” desires as Baldwin's fiction attempts to represent. It is easy, then, to imagine Baldwin's work and queer theory as both sensibly and even necessarily folding into each other, with the conceptual framework elucidating the author's fiction anew while the fiction helps the queer interpretive apparatus live up to its theoretical promise. I argue in this book that we can and must imagine more. If one broad goal of this project is to re-introduce Baldwin through queer theory, the work involved in doing so also produces a reciprocal encounter with the “purely intellectual history” that, as Michael Warner's epigraph attests, can never fully capture the spirit of queer theory. In this dialectic, Baldwin and queer theory become an uneasy pairing, a sometimes bad fit that produces new critical traction, As I use it in this book, the phrase “the queer imagination’ indicates the meeting ground for this re-energized coupling, the field of play on which is negotiated the dynamic relationship between Baldwin's creative capacities and the theoretical interpretive venture, itself creative.

Modeled upon Baldwin's understanding of identity as a multidirectional switchpoint for sameness and difference, my thesis runs counter to itself. On the one hand, Baldwin imagines non-normative desires, and queer theory succeeds in articulating their complexity. On the other hand, the queer imagination continually undermines itself, marked, I will argue, by its own surprising contradictions and unexpected ruptures. The queer Baldwin is not simply the liberatory or the visionary or the multiple Baldwin but rather the paradoxical Baldwin. To read his paradoxicality, queer theory must, to adapt one of Baldwin's prized metaphors, estimate the price of the queer ticket, the price of the incommensurability that is identity. For better or worse, no firm template or consistent methodology for reading queerness can possibly emerge in the discussion that follows, as paradox is hermeneutic inconsistency itself, a puzzle every time. Therefore, the queer theory

Brim, Matt. James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6975932 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor eminent in this study is not thematic. Rather, the non-trope of queer paradoxicality insists, unhelpfully to be sure, that you will know it not when you see and recognize it but when it surprises and confounds you most. Queer paradox offers little predictive value.

Broadly speaking, the imaginative dynamic that I trace here emerges out of what I argue is the vexed relationship that queerness has to normative practices, both representational and disciplinary. I want to trouble that relationship even more by reimagining the queer/norm dyad beyond a liberation/constraint paradigm, as I sense this coupling has become a static conceptual tool in queer theory. The Foucauldian model of power, in which there is no “outside,” has provided a foundation for conceptualizing the queer/identity relation, but it has also had the unintended effect of creating a closed interpretive loop—everything is within the field of power. Working in that tradition, theorists rightly aver that the queer creative practices are not simply free; they are free even as they confine and are confined. We say that queer theory is not only liberatory but always under the pressures of normative reinscription and reabsorption. The outstanding new anthology The Routledge Queer Studies Reader demonstrates just this operation of internal critique in its first section of essays, “Genealogies,” the contents of which provide a brief history of queer theory as an enterprise ceaselessly trying to slip out from under its surprisingly normative self. Exemplary in this regard, as well as in its clarity, is Cathy Cohen's “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens.” Perceiving the construction of the queer/hetero binary to be a reappropriation of queerness in order to sustain racial and class inequalities, Cohen confronts the folly of locating queerness easily beyond or in distinction to norms: “In many instances, instead of destabilizing the assumed categories and binaries of sexual identity, queer politics has served to reinforce simple dichotomies between heterosexual and everything queer.” Queerness operates less in distinct opposition to normality than at an unpredictable remove from it, and that distance seems to be ever collapsing. In our field of vision, the queer sky and the normative sea share a broad and blurred horizon, and much of the most influential queer theoretical work has taken place at this line of convergence.

Perhaps the most pervasive critical response to this disheartening recontainment has been to imagine ever-queerer queernesses. Queer theory makes its way by trucking suspicion for hope. The interrogatory subtitle of Cohen's essay, “The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?,’ dances along this line, both denuding “radical” queer politics and calling for readers to

“construct a new political identity that is truly liberating, transformative, and inclusive of all those who stand on the outside of the dominant constructed norm of state-sanctioned white middle- and upper-class heterosexuality.” Note the dual motion here: the gesture toward liberation, frequently made with reference to the future, futures, and futurity, is itself exemplary of and foundational to a queer theoretical impulse. The late José Esteban Muñoz opens his study of queer futurity by beautifully capturing the more general queer theoretical sentiment that “[q]ueerness is not yet here.’ “Queerness,’ writes Muñoz, “is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.” Yet even as queer theory embraces and privileges radically emancipatory futural projects, it binds itself to normativity not simply because norms create the boundaries through which queerness breaks but, rather, because that rupture is never a clean break. Even—or especially—in what Jasbir Puar calls “queer times,’ the “fantastical wonders of futurity”* are not easily dislocated from the present. Norms and queerness entangle one another and even, as Cohen's example demonstrates, become indistinguishable.”

I want to suggest that queer theory's revelation and intersectional analysis of ever-proliferating normative structures might be said to constitute a gross system of sexual and gender normalization from which no queerness is safe. Of course, the largely deconstructive push-pull of queerness and normativity has produced a deeply textured analytic fabric that, to its credit, has refused to tie off its loose ends. But it also has produced a vicious cycle: we must constantly seek out a more liberatory queerness, but the work of doing so inevitably produces a critique that reads the norm back into the queer (as opposed to the early provocations of Judith Butler to “wor[k] the weakness in the norm”®). Because this twin critical impulse to queer norms and renormalize queerness has largely come to define the field of queer theory, it is time to consider whether we have been so intent on queering normativity, on revealing it and divesting it of its quiet power, that we have become yoked to normativity itself. The dilemma of how queers should regard this “general” theory of normativity, as opposed to individual norms, is urgent. Valerie Traub, in her critique of the “new unhistoricism’ in queer theory, argues that “queer is intelligible only in relation to social norms,’ social norms themselves being fairly recent inventions. She thus refuses to “celebrate the instability of queer by means of a false universalization of the normal” that, for instance, frames temporality itself as a normative construction to be undermined. She wonders if queer theory attempts“to produce a binary for the

Brim, Matt. James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6975932. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor sake of deconstructing it.” Floating free of their contexts, norms provide a generic metanarrative for queer theory. But is normality queer theory's enemy, the pervasive obstacle to liberation, or does normality function as queer theory's bête noir because queer theory, by ceaselessly constructing and then confronting the beast, remains forever in its shadow?

While grounded in the legacy of queer theory's insights about subversion and constraint,® I am drawn here to an alternate power dynamic by which an active relationship of queerness to normativity emerges in queer thought. Structuring this other tension within the queer imagination, as I have suggested, is the element of paradox, which provides a useful framing concept for this study because it names the kind of logical inconsistency that I trace through Baldwin's fiction and that I want to draw out more generally for queer inquiry. The idea that queer is a site of contest and theoretical “trouble” has, of course, been part of its definition since the inception of the field of queer theory and, prior to that, its personal/political reappropriation. Michael Warner, whose recent essay, “Queer and Then?: The End of Queer Theory?,” takes stock of twenty years of queer theoretical work, points to “queer theory's ambivalence about itself ”—witnessed through its constant self-critique, its institutional discontents—as perhaps its most long-standing attribute.’ But I want to suggest that a special paradoxicality, a dynamic sharper than ambivalence, deeply marks queer thought.

Conceptually, paradox offers a pointed tool for thinking about queerness because even as it rejects “[t]he process of ignoring or at least downplaying queers’ varying relationships to power,’ it also refuses simply to dismiss queer’s recurrent normativities as “unqueer” moments within a “properly” progressive trajectory of queer liberation. Instead, paradox offers a framework for incorporating those “outlier” moments into queer thought without simply resorting to the real but hyper-ready charges of homonormativity and unexamined privilege. As I refuse to excise the unqueer from queerness, I also will not argue that Baldwin occupied (nor will I try to use Baldwin to ascend to) a theoretical position of “queerer than thou.’ That kind of competiveness, which Warner identifies as a pervasive trend in queer academe, is itself excessively available to the paradoxical critique offered here, a critique that insists on and does not try to chastise or suppress the sporadic pulse of an unqueer undercurrent within the queer imagination.

If queer paradox refuses to efface the unqueer, it also does not allow for a tepid, enfeebling compromise by which queer creative energies are kept on the normative tether of “the possible,” as in celebrations of (often politi-

Brim, Matt. James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6975932 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor cally defanged) irony. In fact, I believe that queer’s liberatory impulses often create breathtakingly successful theories and practices, a fact that cannot be easily reconciled with queer’s constant failures. In the world of queer creativity, Jack Halberstam reminds us, “possibility and disappointment often live side by side.” Paradox, capable of compassing extremities without remaking or reducing them, can help to articulate that conundrum. Further, paradox surpasses the blithe construction of non-normativity and normativity as a “mutually constitutive” binary, the deconstruction of which produces difference as a predictable building block of meaning. While I accept the poststructuralist intervention that insists on the collapse of all binaries under the weight of their own faulty reasoning, that formulation is no longer sufficient for conceptualizing the queer/unqueer relationship. My intent has been to leverage the strange obstinance of that binary rather than to explore its slippages, for beyond the oppositional complementarity of queer binarisms lies a radical incommensurability. Queerness and normality are shockingly, incompatibly, compellingly—in short, paradoxically—sustained, and they are therefore in need of a new tensile logic. How, queer paradox forces us to ask, have these things possibly come together here? Baldwin, in his oeuvre, his critical reception, and his theoretical utility, offers a flash point for this kind of radical coupling that eclipses a subversion/constraint or oppositional paradigm. I am fascinated by Baldwin because his work extends the moment when the queer and the unqueer exist in unpredictable, unresolvable, untenable relation.

Paradoxes, then, are interesting and useful because they require and are defined by unscripted and bizarre tensions and differences. They derive their interpretive potential from their resistance to logical explanation or structural consistency. No theoretical exercise in wordplay, paradox, as I use it here, illuminates a deep and productive troubling of queer imaginative acts. Rather than participating in the queer “gotcha” game, the goal of which is to assert or invent a new queerness, a queerer queerness, I suggest that we might look with a curious eye toward “queer normativities’—a paradoxical phrase, to be sure—not in order to expunge normativity from queerness (which is impossible) or to luxuriate in our guilt and abrade ourselves on the sharpened edges of our endless self-critique but in order to de-energize those very cyclonic winds in which the field seems to spin, sometimes out of control, In short, by charting the paradoxical ruptures of normativity within the queer imagination, we might become self-critical in new ways.”

My argument is not that queerness is always paradoxical (although I

Brim, Matt. James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6975932 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor believe it very often is). Instead, I suggest that paradox offers one of the more complex and interesting access points for thinking across the spectrum of queer creative thought. My use of the phrase “the queer imagination’ in this book's title announces the kind of logical inconsistency akin to paradox taken up here, for its definite article “the” refers to what, by almost any account, must be considered an indefinite noun, “queer imagination.’ Against the apparent multiplicity of queer imagination, this use of “the” attempts to maintain an odd sense of discretion, for I work singularly with Baldwin and with a finite number of queer approaches to his work. But as much as anything else, this use of “the” points to my own individual and limited queer imagination, a reality that will be evident throughout the book. Still, out of the small and insistent truth that enables (forces) one to recognize one’s own situatedness within acts of queer imagination emerges a larger lesson: queer thought is often strangely conflicted. Queer thought is strangely conflicted even for the brilliant Baldwin, and the same proves true for queer theory of the “highest” order and queer politics of the most progressive kind. I am fascinated by that conflict. I hope that this book builds toward a theory of queer paradox that might prove useful beyond the various limitations of my own queer imagination, on which, paradoxically enough, it relies.

One way I have structured my analysis is through a series of neologisms and chapter titles meant to render the paradoxicality of the queer imagination visible in linguistically concrete terms. The remainder of this introduction uses Baldwin's own trope of seeing the invisible, perceiving “the evidence of things not seen,” to argue for the expansiveness of his queer imagination and the increasing intricacy by which queer studies generally and black queer studies specifically have explored the far corners of that imagination. I begin, therefore, by privileging the liberatory vein of the queer paradox. This book's chapters then take up the task of analyzing Baldwin and his work from a variety of more acute angles. Chapter 1 addresses the paradox of “queer utility” by which Baldwin and his work have become useful for a variety of purposes quite opposed to the goals he set out for himself as a writer. Chapter 2 explores the tensions among queer, gay, and transgender interpretive frameworks, arguing that the three are largely incommensurate and unassimilable yet also interanimating and individually insufficient. The result is an analytic that refuses either a ready conflation of the three (as, for instance, “Queer”) or their resolute categorical separation according to the politics, identity, and ideology that motivate one's interpretation. Chapter 3 casts as paradoxical the terms “gay sex” and “gay love” as they are made to

Brim, Matt. James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6975932 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor stand in for the abstraction that is straight male-straight male sex in Baldwins third novel, Another Country. Chapter 4 examines the related paradoxical figure of “Papas’ Baby,’ the fantastically racialized offspring of the white male and black male dyad that is perhaps the author's most privileged figure. Finally, this book's conclusion turns most explicitly to the surprising ways queerness seems to be so very strangely pierced by the normative. It operates as a bookend to the queer liberatory claims of the introduction by tracing the ways Baldwin, caught in the normative undertow of his own queer imagination, invisibilizes the visible through a failure to represent lesbians in his fiction, even while he deeply engages with them in public dialogue. Queer theory is a fascinatingly imperfect tool, its leverage offering up both good and bad surprises. Through the notion of queer paradox, I have tried to identify the most surprising and “impossible” moments in Baldwin, to elaborate the inconstancy by which the queer imagination succeeds and fails, and to glean meaning about that dynamic. Throughout, I maintain that the wide-ranging field of queer studies must discern and critically sustain, rather than simply override, the paradoxical tensions inherent in the queer imagination,

SEEING THE UNSEEN

James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination argues that twentieth-century American writer James Baldwin had a paradoxical queer imagination. The book suggests that the author's fiction proceeds unevenly, in ways that can be as restrictive as they are revelatory, and that his work therefore exemplifies an “unqueer” undercurrent in queer creative thought. In the remainder of the introduction, however, I emphasize the more immediately striking aspect of Baldwin's queer imagination: the ability, the vision, and the daring to confront desires that exist in the cultural imaginary yet have simultaneously been made culturally unintelligible. I want to expand the discussion of Baldwin's status as witness to twentieth-century America, a much-invoked moniker for his racial positioning, to focus on his ability to marshal the “evidence of things not seen” into a case for queer reality. Indeed, I suggest that Baldwins most unfailing characteristic as a writer—his investment in drawing “impossible” yet undeniable desires into the realm of literary representation—is this method of figuring unseen reality, which I take to be central to queer imaginative work.

By virtue of the author's status in American letters and the very public nature of what might be called his critical writing persona, the title of my book and the thesis toward which it gestures may seem either obvious or overreaching, On the one hand, for the many readers who have chosen to learn and know it, Baldwin has made black gay literature synonymous with queer creative culture. On the other hand, many scholars and cultural arbiters have “known” Baldwin only by deferring that very racial/sexual knowledge, holding it at bay, making it someone else's business. Navigating between these two knowledges, one intimate and the other estranged, I argue both that Baldwin's queer imagination is anything but obvious and that queer ideation is inextricable from his work. In fact, it is precisely by reclaiming queerness for Baldwin that we can discover the broad regions and readerships to which his queer imagination lays claim. My insistence that Baldwin's queer imagination has broad cultural implications therefore contains within it the call for queer cultures to re-energize their relationships to Baldwin's writing, as well as an indictment of the ways dominant culture invisibilizes its relationship to queer thought.

To queer Baldwin is, first, to release him from a history of particularly tight-fisted reading practices. Traditionally (and often, still) critics have squandered our opportunities to understand Baldwin as a black queer male writer. As a site of multiple subjectivities, Baldwin's complex identity as a black queer male writer might have been explored early in the young author’s career with the publication of Go Tell It on the Mountain in 1953 and of Giovanni's Room in 1956. Yet for many critics and canon makers, these novels have made an odd and incompatible pair. The first book would become

17? while the second would become, a much-taught “black experience nove quite distinctly, a staple of the “gay canon.”"[B]y privileging either race or sex,’ Magdalena Zaborowska notes, “[w]e have . . . inherited and been haunted by the black writer from Harlem of Go Tell It on the Mountain or the gay writer from Paris of Giovannis Room.’ The relationship between these works, each a classic in its own right, points to one of the long-standing problems in Baldwin criticism, a problem summed up by the misleading question: which Baldwin are we reading? The publishers of Go Tell It on the Mountain rejected the Giovanni's Room manuscript as a threat to the literary future of a promising young author whose calling seemed so clearly linked to his powerful, if still emerging, black voice. While Giovanni's Room was largely seen as a “curious little detour” whose reception in the popular press was ‘cautiously positive,’ that reception required its own disavowals.

IO JAMES BALDWIN AND THE QUEER IMAGINATION

The press’ curiosity often rested invisibly on a tolerance made possible by white critical distance. Marlon Ross asks ironically, “What did white men have to lose from mildly praising such a novel?” As Baldwin's works moved into the academy through African American literary studies and gay literary studies—just the fields one might expect to offer the most nuanced theoretical frameworks for reading Baldwin—each discipline instead performed its own disavowals. While “in the context of African American literary and cultural studies, historically [Giovannis Room] has been alternately dismissed or ignored altogether, stumblingly acknowledged or viciously attacked,” Go Tell It on the Mountain has been a core text. That Giovanni's Room contains no black characters has allowed most gay literary scholars to avoid discussions of how dramatically raced the narrative is, while Go Tell It on the Mountain has been made, impossibly, black not queer.” Baldwin's writing has led an “odd double life.”®

‘The distorted double life of Baldwin's writing, initially created by reviewers but then sustained by a model of academic disciplinarity that formed around the politics of identity, would be somewhat reconciled by the field of cultural studies. As a result, the question of which Baldwin to address found a critically nuanced response: “All of them.’ Cultural studies, as the important 1999 collection of essays titled James Baldwin Now makes clear, has provided a more dynamic, responsive model for intellectual inquiry into the multiplicity or intersectionality of identity that characterizes Baldwin and informs his work. Editor Dwight McBride suggests that “[g]iven the advent of cultural studies in the academy—with its focus on interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity, critical theory, and an ever-broadening notion of culture’-—it seems more possible today than ever before to engage Baldwin in all of the complexity he represents to critical inquiry, considering the various roles he has occupied.’ Baldwin certainly suggests such an approach, for in confronting and articulating the complexities of identity, he is at his most rigorous, most persistent best. Crucial to his repositioning in the academy has been Baldwin's own principle of locating difference, the engine of identity, not without but within. Much has been made of Baldwin’s expression of his deeply held belief in all people's shared humanity, by which he meant not that we are all alike but, rather, that the fates of those that seem most different—the oppressed and the oppressor can stand as the most general example—are irrevocably intertwined. One of Baldwin's personal insights, a poststructuralist commonplace today, is that the racial, sexual, and gendered other is created necessarily as an aspect of the self. In

Brim, Matt. James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6975932 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor one of his last essays, the ostensible topic of which is androgyny and the actual topic of which is the refusal to confront the terrifying otherness in the self, Baldwin writes, “But we are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other—male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.’””°

In a less well-known example from his extended analysis of Hollywood films, The Devil Finds Work, Baldwin frames the complex matter of identity more directly as a confrontation instigated by the outside other but then fully realized through an interiorization of that stranger. Baldwin writes, “An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger: the stranger's presence making you the stranger, less to the stranger than to yourself.’ As I will argue more thoroughly in chapter 4 of this book, this perspective allows for a reverse intervention by acting as a critical wedge into regimes of the normal and making possible such intellectual enterprises as whiteness studies. The more general point here, one that will be made in different ways throughout this book, is that identity for Baldwin is less a marker of static sameness and difference than of unrecognized, painfully assimilable otherness within the self. While the multiplicity of identities that we can associate with the marker “black gay male writer” would seem to suggest an integration of human experience, this composite of terms was troubling for Baldwin, as was the ceaseless interplay of those terms. Paradoxically, attending to the specificity of one’s intersectional identity—race, sexuality, gender, nationality—both orients and disorients, by locating the self in the tumultuous seat of difference, Rather than answering the question of which Baldwin to address, the response that we should include all of them in our analysis raises new and thornier questions.

When Hilton Als refers to “the way in which [Baldwin] alchemized the singularity of his perspective into art,” he hits the mark, for alchemy implies a transformation, more magic than science, of individual parts into something greater than their whole. The ever-slippery, ever-unique alchemy of individual identity that Baldwin describes simply as “a person’ —“a person is more important than anything else, anything else’”**—requires an equally nimble interpretive approach. Representing the disciplinary inter-

Brim, Matt. James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6975932 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor vention with which I will most directly be concerned here, Robert Corber helpfully suggests that “[t]he category ‘queer’ which has recently emerged in literary studies to describe identities, desires, and practices rendered illegible by the available sexual taxonomies seems more appropriate to the study of Baldwin. Such a category acknowledges, as Baldwin himself did, the limitation of identity categories without discarding them altogether:’* Synthesizing Als’ aesthetic perpective and Corber’s academic one, I offer “the queer imagination’ as a way of registering the alchemic dynamic by which “a person” emerges, fails to emerge, or refuses to emerge amidst socially prescribed identity categories.

The opening of the book is shown; the full text loads in the reader.

Loading the full text…

James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination

About this book

Front matter

Index

The end

James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination

About this book

Front matter

Index

The end

Related books

From the same collection, nearest in year