“Why Talk About the Children?”: James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, and the Future of Care

Abstract

AbstractThis essay argues that the child—especially the unborn child that is all potential—has a notably figurative function in the Black literary imagination of the 1970s. The child shifts the emphasis from an ideal nationalist subject (or the aspiration to be such) toward the interactions and ethics of care work. This shift is explored in the novel form, so this essay turns to James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979). As these novels reveal, in a reactionary era when the emergence of neoliberal governance intensified the vulnerability of Black life, the child occasioned literary exploration of care—waged, unpaid, invisible, delegitimated, cross-gendered labor that has sustained Black lives for generations. On such an occasion, the child has a Janus-faced function. From the standpoint of an uncaring present, the child prompts a glance into the life-sustaining practices of the past, while it invites speculation over what future practices could be.As the conduit among imagined states of time, the child exhibits an unspoken interest in reimagining temporal movement—beyond nationalism’s progressive linearity—in an era of disillusionment.