“I Am Not Your Negro Modernist: James Baldwin and the Languages of Black Queer Humanism”

• In Event: Black Lives and the Legacies of US Imperialism

Abstract

On its first pages, Colm Toibin’s On James Baldwin (2024) recasts the works of James Arthur Baldwin (1924-87) as performing for the American letters at mid-twentieth century the kind of modernist linguistic intervention that James Joyce once performed for Ireland at that century’s beginning. Focusing on the language and narrative style of Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Toibin compares its impact to that of Joyce’s Künstlerroman, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Since World War II, a canonical understanding of a US modernist/postmodernist shift has conceptualized the modern thought as primarily concerned with subjectivity and epistemology, and the postmodern as concerned with building on the extreme effects of modernism – emphasizing new ontologies and fragmented selves, differences, subversive genres, and warped chronologies (Brian McHale; T. Tanner, F. Jamieson; T. Eagleton, T. Moi).

While in full agreement with Toibin’s interpretation, in this paper I trace the trajectory of Baldwin’s Black queer literary project from what has been recognized as the modernist idiom of his early fiction to what I argue is an idiosyncratically postmodern polyvocality (Bakhtin) of his underappreciated later works, especially his last novel, Just above My Head (1979). As David Leeming’s 1992 biography describes it, U.S. critics panned Baldwin’s last novel for its lack of racial and social “realism” that was expected of Black writers then. Misunderstanding its sophisticated, hybrid form of a “parable in the form of confession . . . [a] philosophy . . . [and] the sorrow song,” the reviewers dismissed the book without placing it inside its author’s complex literary career. Baldwin called Just above My Head an elaborate “lyric” and his best novel and, in 1980, told the editor and writer Wolfgang Binder that he had been staging “a kind of return to my own beginnings,” a self-search if you will, throughout his fiction.

Spanning 1953 to 1979, his six novels “come full circle from Go Tell It on the Mountain to Just Above My Head,” as a literary historical intervention that defied chronology, genre, and narrative idiom expected of “Negro writers.” Moreover, because a similar cyclicality guides the modern-to-postmodern storytelling in all James Baldwin works, I argue that we must mine his novels for fragments of his life story that he deliberately deployed to stage his theoretical and auto-theoretical narrative innovations. His literary aesthetics and philosophy – what I term his “Black queer humanism”–arise from his changing idioms as his novels sample and echo one another, loop in and out of events signposting Baldwin’s private life, and his literary experiments, all the while challenging the American literary history’s traditional view of the modernist/postmodernist shift. Like his neglected last novel, Baldwin’s late works offer a revolutionary lens on the late twentieth-century postmodern fiction as shaped by US notions of race and sexuality that scholars have begun to articulate only recently (hooks).

Author

• Magdalena J Zaborowska, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor