Of Latitudes Unknown: James Baldwin’s Radical Imagination

Description

Of Latitudes Unknown is a multi-faceted study of James Baldwin’s radical imagination. It is a selective and thoughtful survey that re-investigates the grounds of Baldwin studies and provides new critical approaches, subjects, and orientations for Baldwin criticism. This volume joins recent critical collections in “un-fragmenting” Baldwin and establishing further conjunctions in his work: the essay and the novel; the polemical and the aesthetic; his use of and participation in visual forms; and his American as well as international identities. But it goes beyond other recent studies by focusing on new entities of Baldwin’s radical imagination: his English and French language selves; his late encounters with Africa; his appearances on French television and interviews with French journalists; and his unrecognized literary journalism. Of Latitudes Unknown also addresses Baldwin’s relations with the Arab world, his anticipation of contemporary film and media studies, and his paradoxical public intellectualism. As it reassesses Baldwin’s contributions to and influences on world literary history, Of Latitudes Unknown equally explores why the critical appreciation of Baldwin’s writing continues to flourish, and why it remains a vast territory whose parts lie open to much deeper exploration and elaboration. Cover Contents Foreword: The Death of the Prophet Acknowledgments Introduction: Baldwin’s Radical Imagination Part One James Baldwin: Film, Photography, andthe Visual Arts 1 Black Bodies on Screen, White Privilege in Hollywood: James Baldwin on Lang and Preminger 2 Picturing Jimmy, Picturing Self: James Baldwin, Beauford Delaney, and the Color of Light 3 Lessons in Light: Beauford Delaney’s and James Baldwin’s “Unnameable Objects” Part Two Baldwin’s Journalism and Literary Journalism 4 “To End the Racial Nightmare, and Achieve Our Country”: James Baldwin and the US Civil Rights Movement 5 The Documentary Tradition in James Baldwin’s Écriture Vérité 6 Journeys of the “I” in James Baldwin’s Literary-Journalistic Essays Part Three Baldwin Re-Sighted Transnationally 7 French Baldwin (on Screen): “le criminel artiste” 8 The Terror Within: Giovanni’s Room, L’Étranger, and the Possibility of an Absurd Heroism 9 James Baldwin’s Black Power: No Name in the Street, Fanon, Camus, and the Black Panthers Part Four James Baldwin and Changing Communities:Recontextualizing Baldwin’s Legacy 10 Continuing a Legacy: James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and the African American Witness 11 Baldwin, the “Arab”, and the End of the West 12 Effective/Defective James Baldwin Contributors Index