So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic
Rereading Baldwin’s nonfiction in the context of midcentury Black Atlantic thought
 
James Baldwin’s nonfiction offers some of the most important and challenging thinking on the experience of race, history, and memory in the Black Atlantic world. Yet much of the scholarly literature on Baldwin’s writing reads his work from inside the sociocultural context of the United States, alongside key interlocutors like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Lorraine Hansberry. So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic shifts the critical frame, examining Baldwin’s work as part of a midcentury moment across the wider Atlantic world and tying his reflections to those of thinkers in the Caribbean and Africa to underscore the widening sense, as well as the particularity, of his critical claims. Who is Baldwin to the Atlantic world? And who, then, is Baldwin to the United States? John E. Drabinski recasts Baldwin as a Black Atlantic writer whose unique qualities as a thinker are enhanced by their similarities and differences with fellow writers of liberation in the global Black world.
1147331538
So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic
Rereading Baldwin’s nonfiction in the context of midcentury Black Atlantic thought
 
James Baldwin’s nonfiction offers some of the most important and challenging thinking on the experience of race, history, and memory in the Black Atlantic world. Yet much of the scholarly literature on Baldwin’s writing reads his work from inside the sociocultural context of the United States, alongside key interlocutors like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Lorraine Hansberry. So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic shifts the critical frame, examining Baldwin’s work as part of a midcentury moment across the wider Atlantic world and tying his reflections to those of thinkers in the Caribbean and Africa to underscore the widening sense, as well as the particularity, of his critical claims. Who is Baldwin to the Atlantic world? And who, then, is Baldwin to the United States? John E. Drabinski recasts Baldwin as a Black Atlantic writer whose unique qualities as a thinker are enhanced by their similarities and differences with fellow writers of liberation in the global Black world.
120.0 Pre Order
So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic

So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic

by John E. Drabinski
So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic

So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic

by John E. Drabinski

Hardcover

$120.00 
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    Available for Pre-Order. This item will be released on December 15, 2025

Related collections and offers


Overview

Rereading Baldwin’s nonfiction in the context of midcentury Black Atlantic thought
 
James Baldwin’s nonfiction offers some of the most important and challenging thinking on the experience of race, history, and memory in the Black Atlantic world. Yet much of the scholarly literature on Baldwin’s writing reads his work from inside the sociocultural context of the United States, alongside key interlocutors like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Lorraine Hansberry. So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic shifts the critical frame, examining Baldwin’s work as part of a midcentury moment across the wider Atlantic world and tying his reflections to those of thinkers in the Caribbean and Africa to underscore the widening sense, as well as the particularity, of his critical claims. Who is Baldwin to the Atlantic world? And who, then, is Baldwin to the United States? John E. Drabinski recasts Baldwin as a Black Atlantic writer whose unique qualities as a thinker are enhanced by their similarities and differences with fellow writers of liberation in the global Black world.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780810149564
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Publication date: 12/15/2025
Pages: 224
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

JOHN E. DRABINSKI is a professor in the Departments of African American and Africana Studies and English at the University of Maryland. His books include Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss.

Table of Contents

Prefatory Notes
Introduction: In Search of Black Life
Chapter One: Black Atlantic Origin Stories
Chapter Two: The Negative Dialectics of Race
Chapter Three: Affect and the Afterlife of Memory
Chapter Four: Vernacular as Remnant and Life
Chapter Five: The Unimaginable Price of Home
Chapter Six: The Racial Double Session
Afterword: On the Ethics of Inheritance
Acknowledgments
Notes
From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews