“This is where we met, 400 years ago”: James Baldwin at the Limits of Diaspora

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Description for Program

James Baldwin often remarked that he found the spiritual resolve to write about feeling like a stranger in his native land precisely by fleeing to Europe as a young man. His extended sojourns in Paris, in Switzerland, in Turkey, and finally in St. Paul de Vence were to prove the most productive writing periods for this self-proclaimed “transatlantic commuter.” Abroad, Baldwin found a measure of relief from the immediate terror of Black life in the United States. Yet he also found racialized domination in his travels that were analogous to the oppressions of the US. Across his oeuvre one finds attempts to account for varied yet all too familiar patterns of the violence of racialization. For example, Baldwin confronts various political and aesthetic positions among African, African American, and African diaspora intellectuals, only to come away with more questions than answers in an early 1956 essay, “Princes and Powers.” I Heard it Through the Grapevine (1982), a solemn documentary film from near the end of his life, on the other hand, finds James Baldwin and Chinua Achebe together in, of all places, the old slave market in Saint Augustine, Florida. “This is where you and I met, 400 years ago,” Baldwin remarks, clasping Achebe’s hand to bodily invoke their being chained together, evincing Baldwin’s ambivalent sense of connections to be found, to be created, to be cultivated amongst varied lived experiences of Blackness.
For this 75-90 minute roundtable discussion, which will touch upon the long histories of Black freedom struggles, Laila Amine (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison), El Hadji Samba Amadou Diallo (WashU), Walton Muyumba (Indiana University-Bloomington), William J. Maxwell (WashU), and Dagmawi Woubshet (Univ. of Pennsylvania) join moderator Justin A. Joyce (WashU and James Baldwin Review) to consider Baldwin’s shifting conceptions of—and receptions among—global Black populations.

Sub Unit

• ASWAD

Chair

• Justin Joyce, Washington University in St. Louis

Presenters

• Laila Amine, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• El Hadji Samba Amadou Diallo, Washington University in Saint Louis

• William Maxwell

• Dagmawi Woubshet, University of Pennsylvania

• Walton Muyumba, Indiana University