Contemplating James Baldwin: Language, Courage, and Tenderness

April 13-19, 2008

Inspired by Toni Morrison’s eulogy of James Baldwin (1924-1987), who sought to be “an honest man and a good writer,” the 2008 Bryn-Jones Distinguished Teaching Professor Program focuses on the legacy of one of America’s most powerful cultural critics and essayists of the second half of the twentieth century. The weeklong symposium Contemplating James Baldwin: Language, Courage, and Tenderness brings together scholars and scholarship from many disciplines to celebrate and discuss Baldwin.

Baldwin published more than 20 books. Classics include the collections Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961), and the long essay The Fire Next Time (1963) plus several of his novels. Fire ignited a relentless political urgency smoldering in Baldwin’s social criticism, which Time magazine sanctioned with its portrait of him on the cover of the May 17th issue. His remarkable record also includes three plays, many short stories, notably “Sonny’s Blues,” and six novels, including Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Another Country (1962). Other treasures are a children’s book, a movie scenario based on Malcolm X’s autobiography, a book-length essay on the Atlanta child murders, and Jimmy’s Blues (1983), a chapbook of poems.

In 1983 Baldwin became Visiting Professor of Afro-American Literature at Hampshire College, in Amherst, MA. In the following year, he was named Five College Professor, based in the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He taught in the Five College consortium until 1986. Baldwin spent his later years at his 300-year-old farmhouse residence in St. Paul de Vence on the Riviera, France. That Baldwin managed, “in roughly fifteen years,” observes the literary critic Horace A. Porter, “to negotiate his way from the Harlem ghetto to Paris to the cover of Time and the center of national attention is an amazing story. Given his autobiographical essays, we know he was a self-made man in the most comprehensive sense of the phrase.”

Twenty years after his death, Baldwin’s published work continues to contribute enormously to our understanding of race, ideas about race, and ethical, social, and political consequences of racial thinking. Yet, to constrain him within the segregated precincts of “Negro writer” or race discourse is to diminish Baldwin’s larger significance to American history, arts, and letters, and indeed to the world. At the core of Baldwin’s life and cultural work is the problem of the intricacies and affirmation of identity. Never comfortable with labels such as gay or black, he pursued with intellectual intensity and incomparable eloquence a vision of democratic individualism, which political theorist Lawrie Balfour identifies as genuine respect for “human singularity.” The contemplation of Baldwin’s gifts—Morrison identifies them as language, courage, and tenderness—is unlikely to be exhausted during a seven-day symposium. Rather, Contemplating James Baldwin seeks to offer points of departure for the Carleton community to contribute to an evolving national dialogue about Baldwin and the American scene.

There are many reasons for learning about and teaching James Baldwin in this new century. His life and work are a basis for understanding and analysis not only of the black experience but also of American history in the whole. Cutting-edge interdisciplinary approaches suggest new insights about differing ways of raising new questions about human possibilities relevant to the changing political and social context of today. However, traditional disciplinary modes of interpreting Baldwin promote historical grounding for understanding the complex nature of race, identity, power and social justice. Through lectures, reading groups, exhibitions, films, a colloquium and a dramatic performance, Contemplating James Baldwin: Language, Courage, and Tenderness offers a variety of opportunities for Carleton faculty, staff, and students to interact with each other and with scholars and artists whose work explores what it means to be both human and American.