6 - Baldwin Studies Now

Summary

BRIAN NORMAN, A PROLIFIC SCHOLAR of African American and multiethnic literature, provides a useful glimpse into contemporary Baldwin studies. Since 2005 Norman has published no fewer than five essays on Baldwin's work, and has included Baldwin in a book-length study of the American protest essay. Norman writes about Blues for Mister Charlie in the collection Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination (2008). He argues that, rather than shy away from difference and division, Baldwin used the play to address it head-on. The “power of the polemics of Blues for Mister Charlie, and its moral challenge to its audience to claim reasonability for racial violence, resides in Baldwin's consistent demand that we address the complexities of religion, violence, and class within each side and across the ditch separating the two races” (“James Baldwin's Unifying Polemic,” 95, original emphasis). In “Crossing Identitarian Lines: Women's Liberation and James Baldwin's Early Essays” (2006), he reconsiders Baldwin's early essays in light of reconsiderations of secondwave feminism. Taking seriously scholarly assertions that Baldwin's early work was “proto-feminist” offers us a “productively blurry genealogy of a feminism that arises out of the experiences of African-Americans, including men” (252). Baldwin's early essays, argues Norman, effectively model building a “we” (so important to second-wave feminism) through a speaking “I.” In “Reading a ‘Closet Screenplay’: Hollywood, James Baldwin's Malcolms, and the Threat of Historical Irrelevance” (2005), Norman offers a reading of Baldwin's unproduced screenplay for a film about Malcolm X in which he characterizes Baldwin's “scenario” as “presenting a transformative disorienting history with multiple Malcolms existing at once in the same location in opposition to [Alex] Haley's or [Spike] Lee's versions” (113). And finally, Norman also contributed a piece to James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain: Historical and Critical Essays (2006). In it he argues that the novel “deserves a central status as a pretext for the successful emergence of the American Civil Rights Movement” (13) and that the “simultaneous embrace and harsh critique of religion and the status of the Black Church in the novel is a site at which to bring together previously competing strands of critical debate in Baldwin studies: Baldwin as a novelist and Baldwin as political figure” (14).