scholarly journals “So sensual, so languid, and so private”: James Baldwin’s American South

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-29
Author(s):  
Jeff Fallis

James Baldwin has frequently been written about in terms of his relationship to geographical locations such as Harlem, Paris, St. Paul-de-Vence, Istanbul, and “the transatlantic,” but his longstanding connection to the American South, a region that served as a vexed and ambiguous spiritual battleground for him throughout his life and career, has been little discussed, even though Baldwin referred to himself as “in all but no technical legal fact, a Southerner.” This article argues that the South has been seriously underconsidered as a major factor in Baldwin’s psyche and career and that were it not for the challenge to witness the Southern Civil Rights movement made to Baldwin in the late 1950s, he might never have left Paris and become the writer and thinker into which he developed. It closely examines Baldwin’s fictional and nonfictional engagements with the American South during two distinct periods of his career, from his first visit to the region in 1957 through the watershed year of 1963, and from 1963 through the publication of Baldwin’s retrospective memoir No Name in the Street in 1972, and it charts Baldwin’s complex and often contradictory negotiations with the construction of identity in white and black Southerners and the South’s tendency to deny and censor its historical legacy of racial violence. A few years before his death, Baldwin wrote that “[t]he spirit of the South is the spirit of America,” and this essay investigates how the essential question he asked about the region—whether it’s a bellwether for America’s moral redemption or moral decline—remains a dangerous and open one.

Author(s):  
Charles Reagan Wilson

The American South: A Very Short Introduction explores the American South, a distinctive place with a dramatic history. It is a cultural crossroads, where Western Europe met West Africa in a colonial slave society. The Civil War and civil rights movement transformed the South and remain a part of a vibrant and contested public memory. Moreover, the South's pronounced traditionalism in customs and values have always contended with the forces of modernization and the continuing challenges of racial tension. This VSI looks at Southerners' diverse creative responses to these experiences, in literature, film, music, and cuisine, which have had worldwide influence.


2021 ◽  
pp. 159-191
Author(s):  
Erin R. Pineda

This chapter considers the limitations of civil rights disobedience in transforming white citizens. Building on the work of James Baldwin, Charles Mills, and Elizabeth Spelman and chronicling a “failed” protest at the 1964 World’s Fair, this chapter attends to the discursive techniques of disavowal that white citizens and state officials used to dismiss black activism as inappropriate, irresponsible, gratuitous, and violent—thereby avoiding the claims such protest made upon them, while preserving their own innocence and moral standing. In stepping outside the South and the familiar set of events that make up the public memory of the “short” civil rights movement, this chapter also suggests that some aspects of campaigns like the one in Birmingham were enabled—and publicly legitimated—by the very techniques of disavowal that limited the movement’s radical potentialities.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-128
Author(s):  
Bill V. Mullen

This excerpt from James Baldwin: Living in Fire details a key juncture in Baldwin’s life, 1957–59, when he was transformed by a visit to the South to write about the civil rights movement while grappling with the meaning of the Algerian Revolution. The excerpt shows Baldwin understanding black and Arab liberation struggles as simultaneous and parallel moments in the rise of Third World, anti-colonial and anti-racist U.S. politics. It also shows Baldwin’s emotional and psychological vulnerability to repressive state violence experienced by black and Arab citizens in the U.S., France, and Algiers.


2013 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 911-912

Explores the economic gains experienced across racial boundaries in the wake of the civil rights movement of the American South. Discusses civil rights, economics, and the American South; the political economy of the Jim Crow South; southern business and public accommodations—an economic–historical paradox; desegregating southern labor markets; the economics of southern school desegregation; the economic consequences of voting rights; the downside of the civil rights revolution; and civil rights economics—historical context and lessons. Wright is William Robertson Coe Professor of American Economic History at Stanford University.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven R. Harris

The historiography of civil rights and libraries tells us little about the desegregation of the profession. During the Civil Rights Movement librarians in the American South encountered barriers to their professional participation due to Jim Crow cultural restrictions in the region. Despite activism by a few individuals, the American Library Association was not successful in compelling state and regional affiliates of the Association to integrate their ranks. Four state associations (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgie) actually severed their ties with ALA. Only after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were the cultural barriers removed to permit the southern associations to open their membership to all librarians. Soon after the signing of that legislation, ALA readmitted those southern chapters.


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (5) ◽  
pp. 1100-1134
Author(s):  
Melanie J. Springer

The use of geographic classifications to make empirical or theoretical generalizations is common in political science research. Yet, in most cases, these groupings, in and of themselves, lack broader meaning. Offering an in-depth example of the American South, this study demonstrates the need to scrutinize the qualities we are actually interested in when using geographic classifications to explore political trends. The article begins by discussing the many ways that “the South” has been defined in the existing literature. Then, it evaluates the theoretical and empirical consequences of these various definitions using examples focused on discriminatory practices, voter turnout, and civil rights roll call votes. This evidence demonstrates the importance of grounding one’s definition in substantive metrics and historical context over and beyond basic geography. The study concludes with a discussion of its broader implications that apply to several topics of interest and research strategies.


2019 ◽  
pp. 120-163
Author(s):  
Rebekah J. Kowal

Chapter 3 focuses on the artistic, cultural and political significance of Sierra-Leonean choreographer Asadata Dafora’s work in the mid-1940s. The first part of the chapter examines the import of three African dance festivals that Dafora directed and produced at Carnegie Hall on behalf of the African Academy of Arts and Research (AAAR), a pro-nationalist and anti-colonialist organization founded by Nigerian students living in New York City at the time. Seen in this light, Dafora’s performance of diaspora makes visible practices of black creativity and resistance, seeking to bridge Africanist solidarities toward the formation of a black American identity defined in global terms. The second part of the chapter analyzes the importance of a tour Dafora took with his dance company, Shogola Oloba African Dance Group, across the American South and Midwest, performing “Africa” for largely African American audiences on the eve of the civil rights movement.


Poll Power ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 57-89
Author(s):  
Evan Faulkenbury

This chapter explores how the VEP empowered 129 separate African American voter campaigns during this period, spending over a million dollars, and registering 688,000 black southerners. This chapter argues that this surge of black voting power paved the way for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Wiley Branton led the VEP during this period, and their support, with philanthropic backing, energized thousands of black civil rights activists across the American South. This chapter chronicles how VEP money and support empowered grassroots movements across the South, and how the civil rights movement relied on the VEP.


Author(s):  
Cody R. Melcher ◽  
Michael Goldfield

The failure of labor unions to succeed in the American South, largely because national unions proved unable or unwilling to confront white supremacy head on, offers an important key to understanding post–World War II American politics, especially the rise of the civil rights movement. Looking at the 1930s and 1940s, it is clear that the failure was not the result of a cultural aversion to collective action on the part of white workers in the South, as several histories have suggested, but rather stemmed from the refusal of the conservative leadership in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to organize an otherwise militant southern workforce composed of both whites and Blacks. These lost opportunities, especially among southern woodworkers and textile workers, contrasts sharply with successful interracial union drives among southern coal miners and steelworkers, especially in Alabama. Counterfactual examples of potentially durable civil rights unionism illustrate how the labor movement could have affected the civil rights movement and transformed politics had the South been unionized.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document