Resisting the Temptation to Give Up: James Baldwin, Robert Adams, and the Disavowal of the American Way of Life

Abstract

Reading James Baldwin’s selected writings alongside the works of the photographer of the American West, Robert Adams, this essay examines the critiques of whiteness, the American Dream, and mass consumerism in the postwar era. By engaging Baldwin’s works alongside Adams’ photographs that document the alienation and destruction of land in the American suburbs in the 1960s and ’70s, this piece extends the salient geographic and theoretical scope of Baldwin’s prescience about the cataclysmic consequences of the American way of life.