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Reviews
Cora Kaplan and Bill Schwarz, eds. James Baldwin: America and Beyond.
Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2012. 268 pp. $29.95.
Reviewed by Gerald David Naughton, Gulf University for Science and
Technology (GUST), Kuwait
In titling their ambitious new volume James Baldwin: America and Beyond, editors
Cora Kaplan and Bill Schwarz make a bold claim of inclusivity. As they state in
their Introduction to the collection, “the salient point resides in the conjunction”
(4): the key to understanding Baldwin in a global era is in analyzing how this extra
ordinary writer managed to embed the national in the transnational, and vice versa.
“O ur concern,” Kaplan and Schwarz state from the outset, “is how he imagined
America and beyond” (4). The volume is thus m ore or less neatly cleaved into two
sections: first, “What it Means to Be an American,” and then “A Stranger in the
Village.” A t their most successful, however, the scholars and intellectuals gathered
in this collection eschew such easy distinctions, showing how inadequate clear
divisions become when applied to a writer as rich, complicated, and paradoxical as
James Baldwin.
To give just a few examples from the volume (many would have been possible),
we may turn first to Douglas Field’s essay “W hat is Africa to Baldwin?: Cultural
Illegitimacy and the Step-fatherland” (209-28), which prominently situates his analysis
of Baldwin’s attitude toward the culture and politics of Africa within a careful
discussion of the writer’s early life as a preacher in Harlem and his decisive relation
ship with his father. Baldwin’s “complicated shifting views on Africa,” according to
Field, are rooted in his “troubled relationship with his father” (210). This builds a
biographical frame that situates Africa within Harlem, the political within the personal,
and “beyond” within “America,” thus avoiding unhelpful dichotomies. Vaughn
Rasberry’s “ ‘Now Describing You’: James Baldwin and Cold War Liberalism” (84-105)
similarly connects the national with the transnational; here, the locus of connection
is the Cold War and its intimate (for Baldwin) links with civil rights-era racial discourse
in the United States. Making such perceptive and unexpected connections was the
very lifeblood of Baldwin’s political thought. Kevin Birmingham also outlines this
in his essay, “ ‘History’s Ass Pocket’: The Sources of Baldwinian Diaspora” (141-58),
which explores the interplay of Israel and West Africa in establishing Baldwin’s
national and transnational vision. In Birmingham’s view, “Baldwin discovered the
complexity o f the relationship between privacy and nationhood through a frame of
reference that seems impertinent to both the private life and the national life: through
his transnational life” (144). Such unlikely sources, unexpected connections, and
paradoxical conjunctions are explored throughout the volume— new points of
analysis which are essential if we are to genuinely expand our conception of Baldwin’s
diverse and multifaceted legacy.
It may be pertinent to note here that the project o f broadening the critical focus
on Baldwin is neither completely unique nor entirely new. James Baldwin: America
and Beyond is, rather, the latest step in a project arguably initiated by the Dwight A.
McBride-edited James Baldwin Now (1999) and D. Quentin Miller’s Re-Viewing James
Baldwin: Things Not Seen (2000). Both of those texts expressed their discontent with
African America n Review 46.4 (W inter 20 13): 771 -772
© 2014 Johns Ho pkin s Univ ersity Press and Sa int Louis Univ ersit y 771
what Miller described as the “frustrating” tendency of “literary criticism to fragm ent
(Baldwin’s) vision” (233). More recent scholarship on the writer has continued to
broaden our critical understanding of his vision and his writing— am ong the more
prominent examples of this development, we may consider Magdalena J. Zaborowska’s
James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (2008), Douglas Field’s James Baldwin
(2011), and the Randall K enan-edited The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings
(2011). All o f these studies hinge on the conjunctions in Baldwin’s writing: the
American and the transnational, the political and the aesthetic; the fiction and the
nonfiction; the early works and the late works, et cetera. F or too long, as Kaplan and
Schwarz put it, “one Baldwin has been pitted against an oth er Baldwin, producing a
series of polarities that has skewed our understanding” (3).
The collection und er discussion here is, therefore, to be welcomed. A nd yet,
we may ask ourselves why— despite the worthy efforts of volumes like those cited
above— such critical rallying calls remain necessary. In one o f the m ost dynamic
essays in the collection, R obert Reid-Pharr (126-38) astringendy argues that Baldwin
scholarship, far from expanding into more vivid and inclusive paradigm s, has, in
fact, becom e “setded and static” (127). “As a subject established within the practice
of literary and cultural criticism,” Reid-Pharr continues, “Jam es Baldwin, the many
attestations to his vibrancy notwithstanding, is, it seems, shockingly, surprisingly,
frustratingly dead” (127). To accept such an alarming proposition is to realize the
im portance o f the task which this volume sets itself. Is this the book to breathe life
into an apparent critical cadaver?
Well, the prospects are certainly promising. T he quality o f this volume is over
whelmingly high and includes many of the most exciting scholars on Baldwin am ong
the contributors, no t limiting itself to writers within the academy— one of the m ost
interesting contributions here is from Irish novelist and essayist (and confirmed
Baldwinophile), Colm Toibln. T oibfn’s attentive readings o f Baldwin as a prose
stylist (53-68) are certainly to be embraced. Too often, Baldwin’s skill and technique
have been virtually ignored in criticism amid the clamor to outline his political vision.
Toibln does not om it the political elem ents o f Baldwin’s fiction, but, rather, aims
to demonstrate how these elements emerge from a purely aesthetic, textual prism.
“Baldwin understood the singular importance o f the novel in America,” Toibln
writes, “because he saw the dilemma his country faced as an essentially interior
one” (57).
Toibin’s essay focuses shrewdly on the aesthetic sources w hich animated
Baldwin’s oeuvre. It is a slight pity that neither Toibln nor any of the volume’s other
contributors broach the issue of Baldwin him self as a source text: as a living influ
ence w hich animates current writers in “America and beyond.” We could think here
of writers from Caryl Phillips to H anif Kureishi— or indeed of Toibln himself—
all o f w hom continue to cite Baldwin as a living influence in their bodies o f work.
In the collection’s final essay, Eleanor W Traylor makes the large claim th at Baldwin
helped to begin “the approach th at now prevails to define contem porary fiction
the world over” (231). Traylor’s essay, however, focuses more on intertextual
connections within the writer’s work than o n Baldwin him self as intertext. Perhaps
future scholarship will further explore Baldwin’s role in “defining” contemporary
world fiction.
Notw ithstanding such minor quibbles, however, this is a significant volume that
certainly advances our understanding and appreciation o f a giant o f American and
world literature. A t its most successful, the collection situates itself prominently
within the m any “conjunctions” that animate Baldwin’s th ought and work. It is very
much to be hoped that Baldwin scholarship will continue to follow suit. The rumored
“death” of this critical subject may tu rn out to have been rather exaggerated after
all.
772 AFR IC AN A ME RICAN RE VIE W
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