Why the West Could Not Hear Beale Street: Baldwin’s World-Sense of Female Sexuality

Amy Yeboah

doi:10.3390/h9010009

Abstract

While scholars have noted James Baldwin’s revisionary and transformative literary approach to social constructions of race, class, gender, and crime, there has been very little conversation in that vein regarding If Beale Street Could Talk (1974). Upon its publication, many critics issued negative reviews of the novel, failing to recognize how Baldwin’s view of female sexuality both embraced notions of the body and constructs from an African-centered world-sense. Using a range of theoretical resources from Africana Studies, this paper analyzes how moving beyond Western frameworks regarding knowledge, sexual discourse, and behavior offers a new interpretation of Baldwin’s aims that reclaims and re-imagines Black sexual politics.

Highlights

Literature has been a forum for not merely highlighting controversies and tensions over sexual politics and behavior in American society but furthering the conversation about these complex issues
Against the one-dimensional cultural backdrop of the 1970s blaxploitation films featuring pimps, prostitutes, and street hustlers stooped in plots of sex, violence, and drugs, Baldwin would have the temerity to publish a romance set in the “poor, black world of streets and stoops and store-front faith”, which he proclaimed to his brother David to be “the strangest novel [he had] ever written”—one that gives voice to the Black female sexual experience from a distinctively non-Eurocentric vantagepoint (Baldwin 1973)
Multiple scholars acknowledge Baldwin’s unique and transformative literary approach in grappling with the tensions surrounding the social constructions of race, class, and even law (Gounard 1992; McBride 1999; Balfour and Balfour 2001; Miller 2012)

Summary

Introduction

Literature has been a forum for not merely highlighting controversies and tensions over sexual politics and behavior in American society but furthering the conversation about these complex issues. The experiences of people of African descent with respect to gender, sex, and sexuality, and Black women, have typically been unseen, unanalyzed, and untheorized (Higginbotham 1989; Hammonds 1999). The cultural and institutional recognition of the importance and diverse experiences of Black women (encapsulated in the intersection of the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements), and even the recent film treatment of the novel by director, producer, and screenwriter Berry Jenkins, the time appears ripe to revisit Baldwin and examine his approach. I argue If Beale Street Could Talk takes the reader on a journey through the voice and perspective of a Black woman to reimagine sexual politics for people of African descent

Reception: A Rejection of Baldwin

Philosophy

Discourse

Behavior

Conclusions