James Baldwin Across the Disciplines: A Colloquium

Saturday, April 19 (begins with continental breakfast, ends with dinner and performance) 

This all-day colloquium for faculty and staff brings together national Baldwin scholars and faculty at Carleton, Macalester, and St. Olaf colleges for conversations on approaches to teaching and understanding James Baldwin’s essays and cultural criticism in liberal arts courses.

Faculty invited from the three colleges and professors from the University of Virginia and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, give an array of perspectives, discussing the importance of Baldwin as writer, moralist, human rights activist, democracy theorist, public speaker, and celebrity.

Lectures and media presentations address topics such as the photo-text genre and visuality, history and race, masculinity, sexuality and Black Power, Christian thought, and the structures of feeling in black music and theatre. The interplay between Baldwin’s personal life and his observations of domestic and international events also makes for rich faculty discussions of a writer who consistently interrogated American thought and practice and assessed the binaries of guilt/innocence, love/hate, black/white, male/female, and homosexual/straight.

The colloquium is presented by Harry McKinley Williams, Bryn-Jones Distinguished Teaching Professor of History at Carleton College, and co-sponsored by Carleton’s Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching, which provides major support through the Mellon Faculty Lifecycles Grant.