The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin

by Michele Elam

Overview

This Companion offers fresh insight into the art and politics of James Baldwin, one of the most important writers and provocative cultural critics of the twentieth century. Black, gay, and gifted, he was hailed as a “spokesman for the race,” although he personally, and controversially, eschewed titles and classifications of all kinds. Individual essays examine his classic novels and nonfiction as well as his work across lesser-examined domains: poetry, music, theatre, sermon, photo-text, children's literature, public media, comedy, and artistic collaboration. In doing so, The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin captures the power and influence of his work during the civil rights era as well as his relevance in the “post-race” transnational twenty-first century, when his prescient questioning of the boundaries of race, sex, love, leadership, and country assume new urgency.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107618183
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	04/09/2015
Series:	Cambridge Companions to Literature
Pages:	274
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Michele Elam is Professor of English at Stanford University, California. She is an affiliate with the Michelle R. Clayman Insitute for Gender Studies, African and African American Studies, and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Elam is the author of Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860–1930 and The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium, and is currently working on editing a critical mixed race studies reader.

Table of Contents

1. 'Closer to something unnameable': James Baldwin's art of the novel Jacqueline Goldsby; 2. James Baldwin's poetics Meta Duewa Jones; 3. Go tell it on the mountain: the sermonic in the works of James Baldwin Soyica Diggs Colbert; 4. Paying dues and playing the blues: James Baldwin's existential jazz motif Radiclani Clytus; 5. Baldwin's theatre E. Patrick Johnson; 6. Baldwin's humor Danielle Heard; 7. James Baldwin and Yoran Cazac's 'Child's Story for Adults' Nicholas Boggs; 8. Baldwin's collaborations Brian Norman; 9. Baldwin and black leadership Eric R. Edwards; 10. 'As though a metaphor were tangible': James Baldwin and identity Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman; 11. Baldwin and the occasion of love Christopher Freeburg; 12. James Baldwin's FBI files as political biography Douglas Field; 13. Domesticating James Baldwin's global imagination Magdalena J. Zaborowska.

Editorial Reviews

"The Companion … addresses Baldwin's work in relation to his social and political contexts, as well as examining lesser-studied aspects of his oeuvre, including his collaborations, his poetry, and - best of all - his humour."
Rona Cran, The Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher