Abstract
In the introduction to his 2017 book I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck quotes Toni Morrison's personal testimony at James Baldwin's 1987 funeral, a literary eulogy to the central importance of Baldwin to her and other black writers: “You gave me a language to dwell in, a gift so perfect it seems my own invention” (p. xxi). A new millennial generation has discovered Baldwin, and he has reemerged on the popular scene with the premiere of Peck's documentary on his life and involvement in the civil rights movement, I Am Not Your Negro. The film received a 2016 Oscar nomination in the documentary category. Young activists in the Black Lives Matter movement have just discovered Baldwin. His influence on highly acclaimed young writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates is evidenced in Coates's 2015 tweet: “All of us are chasing Baldwin—even if we don't know it” (quoted in Joseph Vogel, James Baldwin and the 1980s, 2018, p. 20). Accounting for Baldwin's longevity and his creative genius as an essayist is a biographic literary technique absorbingly personal to readers, a talent that intersects with a historical vision so perceptive and analytical that both readers and the nation are placed on the proverbial psychoanalytic couch.
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