Sexuality and statelessness
Queer migrations and national identity in James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2179281 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Meg Wesling (0000-0001-8850-6193) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 55 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 323-336 |
| Publication date | 2019-05-04 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Postcolonial Writing (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1744-9855 • E-ISSN: 1744-9863 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17449855.2019.1617974 |
| OpenAlex | W2961950045 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 15 |
This article reads James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room as a queer diasporic novel. Drawing on feminist work on diaspora and empire, it argues that Baldwin’s exploration of the damaging capacity of homophobia demonstrates its central role in maintaining white supremacy and supporting US nation-building and French imperialism. The narrative unreliability of the protagonist, David, manifests the internal contradictions of the larger state project which renders same-sex desire as both central to the national order and unspeakable within the framework of white imperial masculinity. Baldwin thus shows the privileged status of white masculinity to be impossible without the ubiquity of racialized queer desire as its constitutive Other. By considering Giovanni’s Room as a novel about queer diasporic consciousness, this article relocates Baldwin within an internationalist framework, acknowledges the urgent global political debates that animated his writing and contextualized the novel’s publication, and understands sexuality and race beyond the limits of the national
Aesthetics · Art · Diaspora · Empire · Human sexuality · Identity (music · Literature · Masculinity · Narrative · National identity · Political science · Politics · Queer · Sociology · White (mutation · Latin American and Latino Studies · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Race, History, and American Society · Gender Studies · Law
Between Men
The Mirage of an Unmarked Whiteness
Homosexuality in Cold War America
Black Empire
Sexual Citizenship
Race against Empire
Into the Heart of the Great Wilderness
Existentially Surplus
Black/Queer/Diaspora at the Current Conjuncture
Black Liverpool, Black America, and the Gendering of Diasporic Space
In the Dark Room
Postcolonial masculinities and the politics of visibility
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |