James Baldwin's Narrative of Black-White Kinship

Abstract

In my larger project, I study James Baldwin’s interventions into black freedom movements and I examine his critical dialogue with white people in his time. At the heart of his interventions is a concept that I call boundness — a concept that posits white and black people in America as bound together in what is “literally and morally a blood relationship.” Baldwin describes America as a deeply troubled house in which white people commit violence against and deny their fundamental relatedness to black people. My claim is that the political power of Baldwin’s rhetorical deployment of boundness lies in the disruptive capacity of centering intimacy and impurity in theorizing about race. In the black and white framework, race making has been grounded in myths of and desire for white purity and separation. Impurity and intimacy are Baldwin’s correctives. In this conference paper, using two different texts, I will present Baldwin’s concept of boundness and I will examine some of the rhetorical techniques of Baldwin’s interventions. In particular, I will study the larger kinship narrative, his destabilization of racial categories and his selective use of racial signifiers. I will pay particular attention to Baldwin’s interventions into black nationalist movements and integrationist movements in his time, and I will consider what political space his ideas can open for us today.