Sexuality and statelessness: Queer migrations and national identity in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article reads James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room as a queer diasporic novel. Drawing on feminist work on diaspora and empire, it argues that Baldwin’s exploration of the damaging capacity of homophobia demonstrates its central role in maintaining white supremacy and supporting US nation-building and French imperialism. The narrative unreliability of the protagonist, David, manifests the internal contradictions of the larger state project which renders same-sex desire as both central to the national order and unspeakable within the framework of white imperial masculinity. Baldwin thus shows the privileged status of white masculinity to be impossible without the ubiquity of racialized queer desire as its constitutive Other. By considering Giovanni’s Room as a novel about queer diasporic consciousness, this article relocates Baldwin within an internationalist framework, acknowledges the urgent global political debates that animated his writing and contextualized the novel’s publication, and understands sexuality and race beyond the limits of the national.