James Baldwin’s Lean: Gratuitous Violence and Black Performativity in Take This Hammer

Abstract

This article reads James Baldwin’s performative labor in the 1964 documentary film Take This Hammer as the staging of an engagement between Saidiya Hartman and Judith Butler’s contending approaches to Black performativity. As the film’s host, Baldwin refused the ethnographic gaze and the tendency of documentaries to approach Black people as problems. On the other hand, throughout the documentary, Baldwin exposed and commented on the ubiquitous anti-Black structure that rendered Black people structurally powerless and available to what Frank B. Wilderson III, Jared Sexton, and Steve Martinot have called gratuitous violence. The article applies Kemi Adeyemi’s reading of the queer performativity of shade and the concept of the lean as ways to theorize the ambivalent position of Baldwin’s performance.