scholarly journals James Baldwin and Film Beyond the American Century

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-53
Author(s):  
Robert Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Film Criticism ◽  
James Agee ◽  
Media Form

This article provides an introduction to this special section of James Baldwin Review 7 devoted to Baldwin and film. Jackson considers Baldwin’s distinct approach to film criticism by pairing him with James Agee, another writer who wrote fiction as well as nonfiction in several genres, and who produced a large body of film criticism, especially during the 1940s. While Agee, a white southerner born almost a generation before Baldwin, might seem an unlikely figure to place alongside Baldwin, the two shared a great deal in terms of temperament and vision, and their film writings reveal a great deal of consensus in their diagnoses of American pathologies. Another important context for Baldwin’s complex relationship to film is television, which became a dominant media form during the 1950s and exerted a great influence upon both the mainstream reception of the civil rights movement and Baldwin’s reception as a public intellectual from the early 1960s to the end of his life. Finally, the introduction briefly discusses the articles that constitute this special section.

James Baldwin

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American History ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
First Century ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Twenty First Century

The book is devoted to the works of James Baldwin, one of the most compelling writers of the twentieth century. The authors examine his most important contributions – including novels, essays, short stories, poetry, and media appearances – in the wider context of American history. They demonstrate the lasting importance of his oeuvre, which was central to the Civil Rights Movement and continues to be relevant at the dawn of the twenty-first century and the Black Lives Matter era.

Documenting SNCC and the Rural South

2018 ◽  
pp. 156-193
Author(s):  
Scott L. Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
New Left ◽  
The Political ◽  
Rural South ◽  
James Agee ◽  
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ◽  
Walker Evans

This chapter examines the cultural politics of civil rights movement photography by analysing the work of Danny Lyon who worked as a photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee between 1962 and 1964. It explores how documentarians such as Robert Frank, Walker Evans, and James Agee inspired Lyon’s documentary work and how the political culture of the New Left influenced his work’s reception. The chapter first focuses on Lyon’s photographs of black SNCC activists in the South, particularly Robert Moses. Lyon’s photographs of Moses helped spread a romantic mythology around Moses and SNCC that was useful in recruiting white liberal support up North. Lyon also photographed the rural South’s landscapes and people extensively. Many in the New Left romanticized rural black southerners as true outsiders, the authentic opposites of their industrialized and commercialized societies back home. Consequently, Lyon’s photographs had the capacity to aestheticize the same conditions that SNCC recognized as the source of black subjugation. The chapter also highlights how these images and themes appeared and circulated in a civil rights movement photography book, The Movement, which Lyon contributed to and helped produce.

The Techniques of Disavowal

2021 ◽  
pp. 159-191
Author(s):  
Erin R. Pineda
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Moral Standing ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
The South ◽  
Black Activism ◽  
The Public ◽  
The One

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.

scholarly journals The Divided Mind of James Baldwin

1979 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. W. E. Bigsby
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
The Political ◽  
Lionel Trilling ◽  
New Novel ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Four Books ◽  
Critical Interest

Lionel Trilling once observed that there are certain individuals who contain the “ yes ” and “ no ” of their culture, whose personal ambivalences become paradigmatic. This would seem to be an apt description of a man whose first novel was published twenty-five years ago, a man whose career has described a neat and telling parabola and whose contradictions go to the heart of an issue which dominated the political and cultural life of mid-century America: James Baldwin. And it is perhaps not inappropriate to seize the occasion of this anniversary and of the publication of his new novel, Just Above My Head, to attempt a summation of a writer, once an articulate spokesman for black revolt, now living an expatriate existence in southern France.To date, Baldwin has written six novels: Go Tell it on the Mountain (1954), Giovanni's Room (1956), Another Country (1962), Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), Just Above My Head (1979); four books of essays: The Fire Next Time (1963), Nobody Knows My Name (1964), Notes of a Native Son (1964), No Name in the Street (1972); two plays: Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964), Amen Corner (1968); and one book of short stories: Going to Meet the Man (1965). Born in Harlem in 1924, he left in 1948 for France, driven out by despair of the racial situation. He returned in 1957 and in the heady days of the Civil Rights movement found himself a principal spokesman — his polemical essay, The Fire Next Time, appearing at a crucial moment in black/white relations. Outflanked by the events of the late sixties, he retreated again to Europe. His more recent novels have failed to spark the popular or critical interest of his earlier work.

scholarly journals Baldwin This Time

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-128
Author(s):  
Bill V. Mullen
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Third World ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
State Violence ◽  
The South ◽  
Psychological Vulnerability ◽  
In Fire ◽  
The U.S

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.

Honoring the Paradox of Education

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 284-289
Author(s):  
Laura Meadows
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Popular Media

This essay calls for academics to engage in a more publicly-focused, community-centered intellectualism. Highlighting James Baldwin’s role as a public intellectual in the civil rights movement of the tumultuous 1960s as a model, the essay argues for academics to leverage popular media to reach broader audiences, communicate truthfully but provocatively, and work with and within local communities.

Trends in Popular Support for the Wars in Korea and Vietnam

1971 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 358-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
John E. Mueller
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Opinion Poll ◽  
Popular Support ◽  
The Korean War

In an examination of responses to public opinion poll questions designed to assess the degree of generalized support for the wars in Korea and Vietnam, popular support for the two wars was found to follow highly similar patterns. Support was high initially but declined as a logarithmic function of American casualties, a function remarkably similar for both wars. While support for the war in Vietnam did finally drop below those levels found during the Korean War, it did so only after the fighting had gone on considerably longer and only after American casualties had greatly surpassed those of the earlier war. These trends seem to have been fairly impervious to particular events in either of the wars.It is suggested that the greater vocal opposition to the Vietnam War reflects mainly a shift of opinion within the intellectual left on the wisdom of the two wars. Armed with new techniques of protest learned in its identification with the civil rights movement, the intellectual left has been able effectively to garner great attention for its cause during the Vietnamese War.Also noted was the presence of a rather large body of opinion inclined to follow the President on war policy, giving him considerable room for maneuver, at least in the short run, and making public opinion in this area highly sensitive to current policy.A crude comparison with data from World War II suggests that, while the earlier war was unquestionably more "popular" than the wars in Korea and Vietnam, support was less consensual than might be expected. The popularity of the Korean War rose slowly after its conclusion, but this sort of retrospective support for World Wars I and II may have declined as time went by and, at any rate, was quite sensitive to current events,In repeated instances, differences in question wording were found to alter substantially the response generated to poll questions about the wars.

Race, Labor Markets, and Social Disorder in Twentieth-Century America

2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-239
Author(s):  
William J. Collins
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Educational Systems ◽  
Central Cities ◽  
Migration Patterns ◽  
Economic Experience ◽  
Twentieth Century America

In 1900, approximately 10 percent of African Americans resided in central cities; by 1970, nearly 60 percent did, far higher than the corresponding proportion of whites. This geographic redistribution was central to the twentieth-century African American economic experience, with connections radiating in innumerable directions: to labor markets, housing markets, educational systems, the civil rights movement, and public policy responses to discrimination and poverty. Although migration patterns are not their focus, each essay in this special section is closely connected to the black population's historic redistribution.

scholarly journals The Great Debate

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-27
Author(s):  
Linfield University
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
Conservative Movement ◽  
Great Debate

Born in New York City only fifteen months apart, the Harlem-raised James Baldwin and the privileged William F. Buckley, Jr. could not have been more different, but they both rose to the height of American intellectual life during the civil rights movement. By the time they met in February 1965 to debate race and the American Dream at the Cambridge Union, Buckley—a founding father of the American conservative movement—was determined to sound the alarm about a man he considered an “eloquent menace.” For his part, Baldwin viewed Buckley as a deluded reactionary whose popularity revealed the sickness of the American soul. The stage was set for an epic confrontation that pitted Baldwin’s call for a moral revolution in race relations against Buckley’s unabashed elitism and implicit commitment to white supremacy. In this article I introduce readers to the story at the heart of my new book about Baldwin and Buckley, The Fire Is Upon Us.

scholarly journals “Who’s the Nigger Now?”: Rhetoric and Identity in James Baldwin’s Revolution from Within

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-130
Author(s):  
Davis W. Houck
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American History ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Critical Studies

Despite the proliferation of interest in James Baldwin across popular culture and the academy, few, if any, critical studies of his public oratory have been conducted. This is unfortunate and ironic—unfortunate because Baldwin was a marvelous orator, and ironic in that his preferred solution to what ailed whites and blacks as the Civil Rights movement unfolded was thoroughly rhetorical. That is, Baldwin’s racial rhetorical revolution involved a re-valuing of the historical evidence used to keep blacks enslaved both mentally and physically across countless generations. Moreover, for Baldwin the act of naming functions to chain both whites and blacks to a version of American history psychologically damaging to both. Three speeches that Baldwin delivered in 1963 amid the crucible of civil rights protest illustrate these claims.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document