(Photo by WalterDaran/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Issue 12, Fall 2019

James Baldwin & American Democracy Eleven original essays exploring Baldwin’s elusive terrain between private and public, self and history

With James Baldwin at the Welcome Table

Apparently, Jimmy had been given an advance of $100,000 for If Beale Street Could Talk with the promise of another $200,000 on completion. I gathered that he was anxious to get it done. It seemed as if he needed the seclusion of this special place to write about the tragic life of black Americans.

James Baldwin, Chelsea Manning, and Homonationalism

Like Baldwin, Manning seemed to recognize the appeal to security, along with the stories we tell ourselves about how that security was won, as costly fantasies enacted through both the explicit suppression of information and a deep denial of who we are, or have become, as a nation.

Is Democracy Possible Today?

The thrill was in the prose, in Baldwin’s capacity to wed the intimate and the universal and to make of his life an offering to generations of readers, including those whose experiences were far removed from his own. But the destabilization mattered more. Baldwin’s language upended the order of my understanding, as a political theorist-in-training, and as a white American.