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Books by and about James Baldwin
Go
Tell It on the Mountain /
The Fire Next Time
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Notes of a Native Son
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If Beale
Street Could Talk
Carol E. Henderson,
James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain: Historical And
Critical Essays.
Peter Lang
Publishing, 2006.
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Notes
of a Native Son
By James Baldwin
Reviewed by Dachine Rainer
"Notes
of a Native Son,"
the title essay in this small superlatively written and
phenomenally intelligent collection by the young Negro James
Baldwin, begins like this: “On the 29th of July, in
1943, my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his
last child was born. Over a month before this, while all our
energies were concentrated in waiting for these events, there
had been, in Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots of the
century. A few hours after my father’s funeral, while he lay
in state in the undertaker’s chapel, a race riot broke out in
Harlem. On the morning of the 3rd of August, we drove
my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate
glass.”
Mr. Baldwin has been
enraged into a style; the harshness of his lot, his racial
sensitivity, and the sense of alienation and displacement that
is frequently the fate of intellectuals in this country has
moved him to portray in lyrical, passionate, sometimes violent
prose the complex, oblique, endless outrages by which a man,
particularly a black man, can be made to feel outside the
established social order.
Lacking identity with Negro
culture, and finding it impossible to establish any genuine
rapport with white intellectuals, the Negro intellectual is
singularly isolated. The dissident Jew, with related problems,
has an indigenous intellectual tradition that goes back several
millennia, but the Negro comes from a preliterate culture in
Africa and in the American South; to borrow the language of
theology, the Jewish intellectual is merely a schismatic, the
Negro intellectual, a heretic, and hence in perpetual exile.
Their numbers—and this heightens the lack of belonging to an
in-group—are understandably, few.
Whether James Baldwin is
discussing anti-Negro manifestations, as in his criticism of
Hollywood’s Carmen Jones. Or the disgraceful opportunism
of political groups, like the progressive Party in Harlem
(“Journey to Atlanta”), or Negro anti-semitism, he never
fails to be evocative and illuminating. In “Equal in Paris,”
he does something more, and in “Many Thousands Gone,” the
only piece in the book that doesn’t measure up to the rest,
something less.
In the first, he goes
beyond the specifically racial situation—he is arrested in Paris,
through an error of sorts, and placed incommunicado in prison,
and his account of the experience is the existentialist terms of
the pathos inherent in the human condition; in “Many Thousands
Gone,” an early essay, he psychologically repudiates his
blackness to so alarming an extent that the piece reads like a
literary exercise in schizophrenia. There are many examples:
“Time has made some changes in the Negro face. Nothing has
succeeded in making it exactly like our own. . .” And he
speaks of the Negro as “they” and of himself as “us.”
Almost
invariably, Mr. Baldwin brings a depth, intensity and clarity to
his subject: the peculiar dilemma of Negroes, particularly of
Northern Negro intellectuals who can legitimately claim neither
Western nor African heritage as their own. His virtues are so
great that one can make light of Mr. Baldwin’s weaknesses: his
wit is caustic and nearer tears than laughter, and his
earnestness virtually unrelieved. Humor—and how true this is
for the Negro!—is the only safety mechanism in the perpetual
extreme situation, and one wonders how Mr. Baldwin who reveals
so little has survived so well, for he is certainly the most
perceptive Negro writing today, and, quite possibly, even
granting Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison their very generous
due, the most eloquent.
Source: Commonweal (January 13, 1956)
| Selected Works
Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1953
Notes of a Native Son, 1955
Giovanni's Room, 1956
Nobody Know
My Name (, 1962
Another Country, 1962
The Fire Next Time, 1963
Blues for Mister Charlie (a play, produced in 1964)
Going to Meet the Man, 1965
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, 1968
A Rap on Race, with Margaret Mead, 1971
If Beale
Street Could Talk 1974
The Devil Finds Work, 1976
Just Above My Head, 1979
The Evidence of Things Not Seen, 1985
The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-Fiction,
1948-1985, 1985
Perspectives: Angles on African Art, 1987
Conversations with James Baldwin, 1989
Early Novels and Stories, 1998
Collected Essays, 1998 (ed. by Toni Morrison) |
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Take this
Hammer—a James Baldwin documentary
KQED's film unit
follows poet and activist James Baldwin in the spring of
1963, as he's driven around San Francisco to meet with
members of the local African-American community. He is
escorted by Youth For Service's Executive Director Orville
Luster and intent on discovering: "The real situation of
negroes in the city, as opposed to the image San Francisco
would like to present." He declares: "There is no moral
distance . . . between the facts of life in San Francisco
and the facts of life in Birmingham. Someone's got to tell
it like it is. And that's where it's at." Includes frank
exchanges with local people on the street, meetings with
community leaders and extended point-of-view sequences shot
from a moving vehicle, featuring the Bayview and Western
Addition neighborhoods.
Baldwin reflects on the
racial inequality that African-Americans are forced to
confront and at one point tries to lift the morale of a
young man by expressing his conviction that "There will be a
negro president of this country but it will not be the
country that we are sitting in now."
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Incognegro: A Memoir of
Exile and Apartheid
By Frank
B. Wilderson III
Wilderson, a professor,
writer and filmmaker from
the Midwest,
presents a gripping account
of his role in the downfall
of South African apartheid
as one of only two black
Americans in the African
National Congress (ANC).
After marrying a South
African law student,
Wilderson reluctantly
returns with her to South
Africa in the early 1990s,
where he teaches
Johannesburg and Soweto
students, and soon joins the
military wing of the ANC.
Wilderson's stinging
portrait of Nelson Mandela
as a petulant elder eager to
accommodate his white
countrymen will jolt readers
who've accepted the
reverential treatment
usually accorded him. After
the assassination of
Mandela's rival, South
African Communist Party
leader Chris Hani, Mandela's
regime deems Wilderson's
public questions a threat to
national security; soon,
having lost his stomach for
the cause, he returns to
America. Wilderson has a
distinct, powerful voice and
a strong story that shuffles
between the indignities of
Johannesburg life and his
early years in Minneapolis,
the precocious child of
academics who barely
tolerate his emerging
political consciousness.
Wilderson's observations
about love within and across
the color line and cultural
divides are as provocative
as his politics; despite
some distracting
digressions, this is a
riveting memoir of
apartheid's last days.—Publishers
Weekly
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Becoming American Under Fire
Irish Americans, African Americans, and the Politics of Citizenship
During the Civil War Era
By Christian G. Samito
In Becoming American under Fire, Christian G. Samito provides a rich account of how African American and Irish American soldiers influenced the modern vision of national citizenship that developed during the Civil War era. By bearing arms for the Union, African Americans and Irish Americans exhibited their loyalty to the United States and their capacity to act as citizens; they strengthened their American identity in the process. . . . For African American soldiers, proving manhood in combat was only one aspect to their quest for acceptance as citizens. As Samito reveals, by participating in courts-martial and protesting against unequal treatment, African Americans gained access to legal and political processes from which they had previously been excluded. The experience of African Americans in the military helped shape a postwar political movement that successfully called for rights and protections regardless of race. For Irish Americans, soldiering in the Civil War was part of a larger affirmation of republican government and it forged a bond between their American citizenship and their Irish nationalism. The wartime experiences of Irish Americans helped bring about recognition of their full citizenship through naturalization and also caused the United States to pressure Britain to abandon its centuries-old policy of refusing to recognize the naturalization of British subjects abroad. / For Love of Liberty |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update
10 April 2012
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