The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

When mentioned in the context of American philosophy, James Baldwin is most often utilized as a resource for extending the tradition beyond the predominant influence of the Big Three (Peirce, James, Dewey) and/or to emphasize the contributions of African Americans to the history of American thought. As examples of this trend we find, for instance, Richard Rorty’s praise for Baldwin as a melioristic public intellectual.¹ Cornel West has also routinely mentioned Baldwin as a thinker who was willing and able to confront the tragic dimension of American life head-on in the face of challenges such as death, apathy, ignorance, and white supremacy.² And more recently, Eddie Glaude has advocated a “return to James Baldwin” as a means of tempering this country’s overly facile optimism.³ While I do not dispute that these uses of Baldwin have been admirable and worthwhile, it is nevertheless important to note that many of the philosophical works that endeavor to treat Baldwin’s thought have focused almost exclusively upon the 1963 book-length essay The Fire Next Time. Certainly a remarkable document by any estimation, Fire has been rightfully described as one of the great achievements of twentieth-century essay writing, but it makes up not even one-tenth of Baldwin’s significant nonfiction output, which is to say nothing of his achievements as a fiction writer (his main ambition, lest we forget). In any event, to this day there is no thorough consideration of the philosophical contribution that Baldwin has made throughout his career as playwright, novelist, essayist, and public intellectual.

While the wholesale remedy of this oversight is beyond the scope of this essay, I would like to draw attention to one aspect of Baldwin’s thought that has received remarkably little philosophical commentary: his writing on issues of sexuality. While it is certainly true that in his nonfiction writings and public appearances, Baldwin focused his analysis more regularly upon the problems of racism, themes of sexuality run throughout his body of work. Already in 1956, well before his involvement with the civil rights movement, which would provide his most enduring legacy, Baldwin published a novel centering upon a homosexual love affair between an Italian and a white American living in Paris entitled Giovanni’s Room. The work would eventually come to be published by Dial after being rejected by Knopf, the publisher of Baldwin’s largely autobiographical first novel (Go Tell It on the Mountain) that centered upon a black boy’s [End Page 40] coming-of-age in Harlem amid the backdrop of family life and the church. According to Baldwin’s own account of the Knopf editor’s reception of Giovanni’s Room, he was instructed to burn the novel because—much more incendiary than the topic of homosexuality itself—he would be throwing away his black readership by deviating from his brand in such an unexpected and extreme way.

I would argue that already in this relatively early episode we can find a sign of the way that Baldwin’s refusal to forego the complexity of his identity in favor of the culture’s preordained categories would complicate how he was to be remembered. As Americans today, let alone in Baldwin’s era, we simply lack the schema appropriate for adequately encountering the profundity of the man whom Jack and Bobby Kennedy used to refer to as “Martin Luther Queen.” A prominent theme that runs throughout both Baldwin’s fiction and nonfiction is that, whether we like it or not, who we are is a story that never fits so easily into the names that others call us or that we call ourselves. As a means of extending and deepening our understanding of Baldwin’s philosophical contribution, the issue of sexuality cannot any longer be taken as one that is merely incidental to his corpus, as we have let it be for far too long.