Achieving James Baldwin’s America: Abolition and Revolutionary Politics

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

Through his fiction, essays, and activist speeches, James Baldwin often invoked revolution to achieve what he termed the fulfillment of the American dream. These were calls for not just reflection, but also for action—for risk and sacrifice to achieve our country. He wrote openly and often about the need to break free of the confines of limited and limiting identities, less often but no less passionately about the need to reform or reject wholesale the American prison, political, and economic systems. Alas, his words from nearly a century ago still ring true in our world wrought by nationalist paramilitaries murdering citizens in broad daylight. His call has not yet been heeded in our moment when politics dictates ever more partisan divides that allow stasis and disfunction to further enable kleptocratic American rule. This panel, convened by _James Baldwin Review_—chaired by the journal's founding co-editor Justin A. Joyce and featuring award-winning scholar Koritha Mitchell as commentator—presents four papers that look to Baldwin’s stagecraft, essays, and novels to explore the entwined political, social, and economic issues of abolition and revolutionary action.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Rethinking Witnessing and Abolition - Jess A Goldberg, New Mexico Highlands University

• Rendering the Corridor Impassable: Teaching James Baldwin and the Question of Abolition - Juyoun Jang, Trinity University

• Plaguetown, USA: A Social Identity Approach to Baldwin’s Communities of Political Activism - Robert Tate Morrison, University of North Texas

• Revolutionary possibility in Baldwin’s Black Queer Materialism - Justin Rogers-Cooper, Cuny Laguardia Community College

Chair

• Justin A. Joyce, Washington University in St. Louis

Commentator

• Douglas Field, University of Manchester

Biographical Information

Dr. Jess A. Goldberg (they/she) is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Gender & Women’s Studies Program at New Mexico Highlands University, where they co-chair the President’s Council on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. They are the author of Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice(University of Minnesota Press, 2024) as well as numerous academic journal articles and chapters in edited collections. With Marquis Bey, they co-edited the special issue of GLQ titled Queer Fire: Liberation & Abolition in 2022.

Juyoun Jang is Assistant Professor of English at Trinity University. She teaches African American and multiethnic literature and carceral humanities. Her research examines fugitivity, confinement, and the afterlife of slavery in contemporary Black and transnational narratives. She has taught in prison education programs and co-edited The Global South special issue “Resistance and Incarceration.”

Robert Tate Morrison is a fifth year PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow at the University of North Texas. His focus is Twentieth Century African American literature and the work of James Baldwin, and he is currently writing his dissertation focused on the role communities play in identity formation for the characters in Baldwin’s fiction and drama. He received his M.A. in English from the University of Texas at Arlington, where his work explored Baldwin's essays in a Digital Humanities project.

Justin Rogers-Cooper is Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College and faculty in the Master's in Liberal Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research and scholarship concerns interdisciplinary frameworks in American studies, nineteenth and twentieth century literature, working-class culture, and racial capitalism. He has forthcoming chapters in the collections Parasitical Logic in Culture and Society and The Routledge Companion to James Baldwin.

CHAIR--Justin A. Joyce is managing editor of James Baldwin Review and senior publications editor at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the secretary for the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and a board member for the Collegium on African American Research. An interdisciplinary scholar of American literature, legal paradigms, and popular culture, Joyce has written on Baldwin, slave narratives, film and television, and the Western genre’s intersections with American law.