Born-Again, Seen-Again James Baldwin: Post-Postracial Criticism and the Literary History of Black Lives Matter

Abstract

This essay reviews three recent scholarly books on James Baldwin—Matt Brim’s James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination (2014), Douglas Field’s All Those Strangers: The Art and Lives of James Baldwin (2015), and Consuela Francis’s The Critical Reception of James Baldwin, 1963-2010: “An Honest Man and a Good Writer” (2014)—in the context of what it labels “post-postracialist” criticism, or the return to racial ground in black cultural studies that ironically accompanied the inauguration of the first black US president. This essay also explores the reasons behind the ongoing Baldwin revival, from his elevated place in the literary and political memory of the Black Lives Matter movement, to his function as a remedy to the frozen time of US Afro-pessimism.