scholarly journals Baldwin This Time

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-128
Author(s):  
Bill V. Mullen
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Third World ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
State Violence ◽  
The South ◽  
Psychological Vulnerability ◽  
In Fire ◽  
The U.S

This excerpt from James Baldwin: Living in Fire details a key juncture in Baldwin’s life, 1957–59, when he was transformed by a visit to the South to write about the civil rights movement while grappling with the meaning of the Algerian Revolution. The excerpt shows Baldwin understanding black and Arab liberation struggles as simultaneous and parallel moments in the rise of Third World, anti-colonial and anti-racist U.S. politics. It also shows Baldwin’s emotional and psychological vulnerability to repressive state violence experienced by black and Arab citizens in the U.S., France, and Algiers.

The Techniques of Disavowal

2021 ◽  
pp. 159-191
Author(s):  
Erin R. Pineda
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Moral Standing ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
The South ◽  
Black Activism ◽  
The Public ◽  
The One

This chapter considers the limitations of civil rights disobedience in transforming white citizens. Building on the work of James Baldwin, Charles Mills, and Elizabeth Spelman and chronicling a “failed” protest at the 1964 World’s Fair, this chapter attends to the discursive techniques of disavowal that white citizens and state officials used to dismiss black activism as inappropriate, irresponsible, gratuitous, and violent—thereby avoiding the claims such protest made upon them, while preserving their own innocence and moral standing. In stepping outside the South and the familiar set of events that make up the public memory of the “short” civil rights movement, this chapter also suggests that some aspects of campaigns like the one in Birmingham were enabled—and publicly legitimated—by the very techniques of disavowal that limited the movement’s radical potentialities.

Solving for X

2012 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-118
Author(s):  
Clayton R. Koppes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Third World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Power ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The U.S

George F. Kennan is renowned as the author of the containment doctrine and subsequently as a critic of American Cold War policy. But other elements of his thought, which have been neglected, are integral to a reconsideration of his stature. He distrusted democracy and proposed ways to limit its expression, discounted movements for human rights in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, believed Hispanics posed a threat to the United States, and often argued against the national liberation aspirations in the Third World (which he considered largely irrelevant to Great Power diplomacy). He failed to grasp the connection between the U.S. civil rights movement and foreign policy. These weaknesses limited his usefulness as a policy adviser and still cloud his legacy as America’s “conscience.”

scholarly journals “So sensual, so languid, and so private”: James Baldwin’s American South

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-29
Author(s):  
Jeff Fallis
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American South ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
The South ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
Essential Question ◽  
The American South ◽  
Legal Fact

James Baldwin has frequently been written about in terms of his relationship to geographical locations such as Harlem, Paris, St. Paul-de-Vence, Istanbul, and “the transatlantic,” but his longstanding connection to the American South, a region that served as a vexed and ambiguous spiritual battleground for him throughout his life and career, has been little discussed, even though Baldwin referred to himself as “in all but no technical legal fact, a Southerner.” This article argues that the South has been seriously underconsidered as a major factor in Baldwin’s psyche and career and that were it not for the challenge to witness the Southern Civil Rights movement made to Baldwin in the late 1950s, he might never have left Paris and become the writer and thinker into which he developed. It closely examines Baldwin’s fictional and nonfictional engagements with the American South during two distinct periods of his career, from his first visit to the region in 1957 through the watershed year of 1963, and from 1963 through the publication of Baldwin’s retrospective memoir No Name in the Street in 1972, and it charts Baldwin’s complex and often contradictory negotiations with the construction of identity in white and black Southerners and the South’s tendency to deny and censor its historical legacy of racial violence. A few years before his death, Baldwin wrote that “[t]he spirit of the South is the spirit of America,” and this essay investigates how the essential question he asked about the region—whether it’s a bellwether for America’s moral redemption or moral decline—remains a dangerous and open one.

scholarly journals Possessing History and American Innocence: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley, Jr., and the 1965 Cambridge Debate

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-74
Author(s):  
Daniel Robert McClure
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
White Resistance ◽  
The U.S

The 1965 debate at Cambridge University between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, Jr., posed the question: “Has the American Dream been achieved at the Expense of the American Negro?” Within the contours of the debate, Baldwin and Buckley wrestled with the ghosts of settler colonialism and slavery in a nation founded on freedom and equality. Framing the debate within the longue durée, this essay examines the deep cultural currents related to the American racial paradox at the height of the Civil Rights movement. Underscoring the changing language of white resistance against black civil rights, the essay argues that the Baldwin and Buckley debate anticipated the ways the U.S. would address racial inequality in the aftermath of the civil rights era and the dawn of neoliberalism in the 1970s.

Too Close for Comfort: Canada, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and the North American Colo(u)r Line

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Asa McKercher
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
North American ◽  
The North ◽  
The U.S

Too Close for Comfort: Canada, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and the North American Colo(u)r Line

James Baldwin

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American History ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
First Century ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Twenty First Century

The book is devoted to the works of James Baldwin, one of the most compelling writers of the twentieth century. The authors examine his most important contributions – including novels, essays, short stories, poetry, and media appearances – in the wider context of American history. They demonstrate the lasting importance of his oeuvre, which was central to the Civil Rights Movement and continues to be relevant at the dawn of the twenty-first century and the Black Lives Matter era.

Pedagogies of Protest: African American Teachers and the History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1940–1963

2011 ◽  
Vol 113 (12) ◽  
pp. 2777-2803 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Baker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Teachers ◽  
Black Educators ◽  
The South ◽  
Student Protest ◽  
African American Teachers ◽  
Segregated Schools ◽  
Extracurricular Programs

Background/Context Although the dominant narrative of the civil rights movement marginalizes the role of black educators, revisionist scholars have shown that a significant number of black teachers encouraged student protest and activism. There has, however, been little analysis of the work of black teachers inside segregated schools in the South. Purpose/Objective This study examines the courses that Southern African American teachers taught, the pedagogies they practiced, and the extracurricular programs they organized. Using Charleston's Burke Industrial School as a lens to illuminate pedagogies of protest that were practiced by activist educators in the South, this study explores how leading black educators created spaces within segregated schools where they bred dissatisfaction with white supremacy. Research Design This historical analysis draws upon archival sources, school board minutes, school newspapers and yearbooks, oral testimony, and autobiographies. Conclusions/Recommendations In Charleston, as elsewhere in the South, activist African American teachers made crucial contributions to the civil rights movement. Fusing an activist version of the African American uplift philosophy with John Dewey's democratic conception of progressive education, exemplary teachers created academic and extracurricular programs that encouraged student protest. Beginning in the 1940s and continuing through the 1960s, students acted on lessons taught in classes and extracurricular clubs, organizing and leading strikes, boycotts, and demonstrations. The pedagogies that leading African American educators practiced, the aspirations they nurtured, and the student activism they encouraged helped make the civil rights movement possible.

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