Challenging the American Conscience, Re-Imagining American Identity

James Baldwin’s writing and his role as a public intellectual from 1957 through the early 1970s must be understood within the context of the racial struggle at the center of American life. Baldwin’s fifteen-year engagement with the black freedom struggle as it evolved from civil rights to Black Power raises some key questions: What was the relationship between his role as a movement “spokesman” and his vocation as a (literary) writer? How did Baldwin represent the movement in his writing and how did that experience impact his writing over time? I put the word spokesman in quotation marks to acknowledge that Baldwin disavowed the term, preferring to call himself a “witness,” so as not to presume to speak for others. However, the term spokesman accurately describes Baldwin’s role by 1963 as a highly visible black intellectual whose opinions were widely sought out and publicized.

Aesthetics · Art · Black Power · Civil rights · Conscience · Context (archaeology) · Identity (music) · Movement (music) · Political science · Power (physics) · Sociology · Witness · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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