All Those Strangers
The Art and Lives of James Baldwin
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20002286 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Douglas Field (0000-0002-8441-6366, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Pages | 220 |
| Publication date | 2015-06-18 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | BOOK |
| Venue | All those strangers (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199384150.001.0001 |
| Wikidata | Q113481236 |
| OpenAlex | W4245565971 |
| ISBN | 9780199384150 |
| Open Library | OL27232740M |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
The book examines how James Baldwin’s fiction and nonfiction shaped and responded to key political and cultural developments in the United States from the 1940s to the 1980s. It is animated by an examination of how external forces molded Baldwin’s personal, political, and psychological development and gave shape to his writing. The book views Baldwin through a cultural-historical lens alongside a more traditional literary critical approach. Crucially, it breaks through the established critical difficulties caused by Baldwin’s geographical, ideological, and artistic multiplicity by analyzing his life and work against the radically transformative politics of his time. The book explores under-researched areas in Baldwin’s life and work—his relationship to the Left, his FBI files, and the significance of Africa in his writing—while also contributing to wider discussions about race, identity, love and sexuality in postwar US culture. In this way, the book contributes to a broader understanding of some key twentieth-century themes—including the Cold War, African American literary history, conflicts between spirituality and organized religion, and transnationalism—but also brings a number of academically isolated disciplines into dialogue with each other. By viewing Baldwin as a subject in flux, rather than trying to fix his life and work into a single paradigm, the project contradicts the accepted critical paradigm that Baldwin’s life and work are too ambiguous to make sense of. It argues that it is precisely by studying Baldwin as an individual and an artist in flux that one begins to uncover the ways in which his work coheres
Aesthetics · Art · Identity (music) · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spirituality · Subject (documents) · Transformative learning · Gender Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society · 20th century · History · james Baldwin (1924-1987) · Political and social views · Politics and literature · united states
| Citations per year | 0.75 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2018 - 2026 (9) |
| Highly cited | No |