Abstract
This article identifies a concept I call ‘boundness’ in James Baldwin’s work and asks how it offers an alternative and embodied way to theorize racial identity, racialized violence and interracial solidarity. In the 1960s, in contrast to black nationalist and integrationist responses to racial domination, Baldwin repeatedly asserts that white and black people are literally bound (by blood) and therefore morally bound together. He posits a kinship narrative that foregrounds racialized/sexual violence, addressing the histories of Southern plantations and Jim Crow communities where lines of racial difference were drawn between siblings or between an enslaved child and his/her biological father. With particular attention to Baldwin’s rhetorical techniques (use of racial signifiers, pronouns, familial language), this article examines boundness in four main texts – White Man’s Guilt, The Fire Next Time, a 1963 Public Broadcasting Service interview and a 1968 speech in London – and demonstrates how the concept functions as a political strategy to provoke shifts in identification.
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Notes
Baldwin (2010 [1971]) , ‘An Open Letter to My Sister Angela Y. Davis’.
See Rogers (2014), Marshall (2012), and Gilmore (2002). Following Hooker (2009), I mean solidarity as an affective and ethical orientation that moves people to action on behalf of others (p. 30). Today, that black pain is ‘illegible’ and black death is ‘normalized’ reveals a crisis and failure in interracial solidarity – that is, a failure by white people to be in active solidarities with black people against anti-black racism (Garza, 2014; Hartman, 1997; Rogers, 2014). While my focus is on white people’s orientation in solidarity with people of color and with black people in particular, it is perhaps self-evident that ‘interracial solidarity’ operates across other racial and colonial lines, as in black-brown solidarity or solidarity between indigenous people and people of color.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States, race as an idea was preeminently attached to the body (Painter, 2010). Across the twentieth century, the framework of race as a social construction was developed in response to and against ideas of race as biological. The social construction framework has primarily focused on the formation of race through discourse, cultural representations, political processes and institutional structures.
See, for example, Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2011) and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997); Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (2006, pp. 108–111); Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ and Other Essays (2005); Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004); and Michael Rogin, ‘The Two Declarations of American Independence’ (1996). See also Joseph Lowndes, ‘Barack Obama’s Body: The Presidency, the Body Politic, and the Contest over American National Identity’ (2013).
As literary theorist Christina Sharpe explains, in slavery, ‘blood becomes property ... in one direction and kin in another’, a process that requires policing affective bonds (2010; see also Stoler, 2006).
Baldwin’s kinship narrative certainly does not function apart from family rhetoric in American liberal nationalism, but I argue that his use of this language rests in a lineage of anti-racist political appeal anchored by Maria Stewart and Ida B. Wells. In an 1831 speech in Boston, Stewart positions white people not as strangers but as kin. She warns that when God someday intervenes to stop slavery and racialized violence:
We will not come out against you with swords and staves, as against a thief [Matthew 26: 55]; but we will tell you that our souls are fired with the same love of liberty and independence with which your souls are fired. We will tell you that too much of your blood flows in our veins, too much of your color in our skins, for us not to possess your spirits. We will tell you that ... it is the blood of our fathers, and the tears of our brethren that have enriched your soils. AND WE CLAIM OUR RIGHTS (Stewart and Richardson, 1987, p. 40; also quoted in Hill Collins, 2009, p. 4).
Later, in the 1890s, journalist Ida B. Wells risked her life by publicly addressing black and white intimacy. She addressed the connections between lynching, economic and political power, the political deployment of the myth of the ‘black male rapist’ and the surrounding moral panic, and white disavowal of interracial intimacy. See Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900 (1997).
For a debate between Margaret Mead and James Baldwin on this matter, see A Rap on Race (1971, p. 69). Also, see Douglas Field concerning the ways in which Baldwin’s public role was circumscribed by gender and sexuality politics. Although Baldwin was in some significant ways sidelined by civil rights activists on account of his sexuality in the late 1950s and early 1960s, by the mid 1960s, Baldwin came under increasing attack by a new generation of radical black American writers (Field, 2004, p. 464). Silences in his essays and speeches around gender and matters of non-normative sexual preference must be read in this context.
Young (2005) argues that ‘what we call categories of gender, race, ethnicity, etc., are shorthand for a set of structures that position persons’ (p. 18). Lived body experiences make up the patterns of how structures position people (and met out death, displacement, violation, protection), but they do not constitute essential categories themselves. Likewise, Baldwin attends to the structural and cultural manifestations of racism while refusing essentialized racial categories. In his invocations of black–white kinship, Baldwin turns to the racialized body – not just in its lived body experiences in the moment, but as containing a history of lived body experiences that come to bear on the present (see ‘White Man’s Guilt’ in Price of the Ticket, p. 410). The body itself holds the history of the invention of race.
The concept of boundness appears throughout Baldwin’s work – in his fiction and non-fiction, his early and late work, his writing and radio/lecture/television record. In addition to the texts examined in this article, see, for example, ‘Encounter on The Seine: Black Meets Brown’ (1950, p. 39); ‘Many Thousands Gone’ (1951, pp. 76–77); ‘Stranger in the Village’ (1953, p. 89); ‘In Search of a Majority’ (1960, p. 234), all in Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket (1985). See also ‘An Open Letter to My Sister Angela Y. Davis’ in Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (2010 [1971]); Another Country (1962) and ‘James Baldwin versus William F. Buckley [1965]’ (http://vimeo.com/18413741).
On Baldwin’s use of the first person plural – the racially ambiguous ‘we’ – see also Balfour (2001, p. 36).
Baldwin deploys boundness with both black and white audiences, and by the very logic of boundness those ‘two’ audiences are proposed to be one. While the kinship narrative does not change between audiences, the conversation is layered. For example, in his speech at the West Indian Student Centre and in White Man’s Guilt, Baldwin’s audience is primarily black but his address allows white people to ‘listen in’, as Shulman (2008) puts it. In Down at the Cross, the form of an open letter to his nephew positions white people to ‘overhear’ Baldwin’s account of whiteness and the meaning of integration (Shulman, 2008; Marshall, 2011).
As Jared Sexton argues, what is at stake in white anxieties about racial mixing is the coherence of racial categories themselves and the (failed) project of achieving whiteness as a ‘securable identity’ (2008, pp. 224–225). Fixation on purity and antimiscegenation is best understood as a ‘quest for racial being’ and a ‘performative reiteration of racial whiteness’ (2008, p. 222).
The West Indian Student Union was formed in the mid-twentieth century as a social club for West Indian students studying in Britain (Clover, 2005, p. 1). In the 1960s, there was a growing interest in international black struggle among West Indian Student Union leadership, largely influenced by African–American concepts of blackness and Black Power ideology (Clover, 2005, p. 9). Independent filmmaker Horace Ové recorded the 1968 event with James Baldwin and Dick Gregory.
White Man’s Guilt first appeared in Ebony magazine as a part of a special issue ‘The White Problem in America’.
In certain ways, Baldwin was also socially positioned outside of integration and black nationalist movements on account of sexual/gender politics (Field, 2004).
I thank Ernesto Martínez and Joseph Lowndes for helping me to clarify this important distinction.
This question may originate with Lorraine Hansberry (Balfour, 2001, p. 145 n. 37).
See Stanley’s (2013) helpful discussion in ‘Toward a Reconciliation of Integration and Racial Solidarity’.
On this kind of anti-racist political struggle as an ‘exceptional, even transcendant, calling’ see Marshall (2011, p. 130). On Baldwin’s letter to his nephew, see Marshall (2011, pp. 152–6).
Take This Hammer was filmed at the height of Baldwin’s popularity as a public figure, soon after the publication of The Fire Next Time.
In quoting Baldwin in this passage, I have omitted the full spelling of the n-word because of the word’s connection to violence and death. I thank Tiffany Willoughby-Herard and Jeanne Scheper for their insights. See Collins (2009) on ethics of accountability (pp. 284–285).
The Racial Contract is a non-ideal contract made between white people, who are ‘the people who count’ and the ‘people who are really people’ within the unnamed and taken-for-granted political system of white supremacy (Mills, 1997, pp. 1, 3).
In Schlosser’s reading, it is in Baldwin’s fiction, not his essays, that Baldwin gives an embodied and relational account of personal transformation (2013).
Baldwin’s invocation of ‘an Indian’ to signify his uncle’s straight hair and whiteness relies on settler colonial representations of Native Americans. The reference also relies on the erasure of Native-African mixed heritage.
In ‘Chicago Tonight’, 22 November 1985. Accessed at the Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York City.
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks go to Lawrie Balfour, Anita Chari, Lynn Fujiwara, Daniel Martinez HoSang, Joseph Lowndes, Ernesto Javier Martínez, Tiya Miles, Heather Pool, Alaí Reyes-Santos, Jeanne Scheper, George Shulman, Courtney Thorsson, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, Priscilla Yamin and two anonymous reviewers at Contemporary Political Theory for their valuable comments. The author is also grateful to the University of Oregon Department of Ethnic Studies and the Center for the Study of Women in Society for their support in this project.
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Beard, L. ‘Flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone’: James Baldwin’s racial politics of boundness. Contemp Polit Theory 15, 378–398 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2015.72
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2015.72