Coming Undone: James Baldwin’s Another Country and Queer Pedagogy

Abstract

In this chapter, I explore some of the terrain opened up by a queer pedagogy that undoes the hegemonic norms of white and black masculinity. Any popular culture text in which masculinity is performed or represented can be read from the perspective of a queer pedagogy, to deconstruct the reigning narratives of masculinity production in American culture. In this case, I am interested in a literary text from an earlier era, James Baldwin’s Another Country (1962a), a novel that graphically depicts how hegemonic norms of white and black masculinity in the United States in the late 1950s were implicated in a destructive undoing of the self, and how the undoing of such norms can lead to a liberatory redoing of race, gender, class, and sexual identity. Baldwin’s novel, I argue, also reveals a perspective on identity that is consistent with many of the central tenets of queer theory and queer masculinity studies. When read and taught through the critical lens of queer theory, Another Country is a novel that explores the self as intersectional, that is, forged out of an ensemble of race, class, gender, and sexual identities that are dynamic and open rather than closed and fixed. I argue that Baldwin also develops a quite complex analysis of the performance of gendered sexuality in the novel and his queer characters engage (although with limited success) in re-performing and redoing masculinity.