“Like the sound of a crumbling wall”: transcultural spatiality in James Baldwin's Just above My Head

Abstract

This essay discusses the novel Just above My Head (1979) by the African American writer James Baldwin. Despite its complexity and multidimensionality, this novel still remains understudied when compared to many of Baldwin's earlier works. I argue that a conception of transcultural spatiality emerges in the text, particularly in a lengthy passage that depicts encounters between people of different national and racial backgrounds in the contact zone of Paris. These encounters occur in heterotopic spaces in which the boundaries of conventional identity categories, such as race, sexuality, and nationality, can be challenged and provisionally transcended. As a result, these real, mundane spaces are transformed into utopian enclaves where new configurations of transcultural coexistence and amity can be experienced and experimented on. This becomes manifest first in the transgressive interracial same-sex relationship between the African American protagonist, Arthur, and a white Frenchman and second in the transcultural experience in a jazz club, where Arthur performs in front of a multicultural audience. The text counters the asymmetrical power relations inherited from European colonial history and provides a fleeting vision of an alternative future through the transient moments of mutual transcultural understanding that occur in these utopian spaces.