![]() ![]() Phillips agrees: “It would have pleased him greatly to see Obama in the White House. “He always writes from the point of view that was not only politically right, but from a humanistic point of view – it was never just about race for him.” It looked beyond the binary racial politics of 1950s and 60s America, toward a future that could genuinely be called post-racial. “I think the person who has probably articulated what it means to be an American and what it means to be black, with more eloquence than anybody else in the last century, is Baldwin.”įor Peck, Baldwin’s writing has lasted because it was so ahead of its time. “People are looking for someone who can articulate these issues,” says Phillips. For him the big issues concerning American life now – the rise of crude, racially charged politics, killings of unarmed black men by the police, an apathetic public – repeat a history from which Baldwin’s critiques still offer some solace. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Imagesįor Baldwin scholar, professor of English at Yale and author Caryl Phillips, the return of Baldwin to mainstream thinking isn’t surprising at all. James Baldwin at a London book launch in 1972. Then, in 2015, came Ta-Nehisi Coates’s bestseller turned must-read commentary on contemporary race relations in America, Between The World And Me, which was inspired by Baldwin’s own essay collection, The Fire Next Time. His work has been used to explain everything from Trump to Dylann Roof and the Charleston church shooting. As the Black Lives Matter protests unfolded around the US, there was a collection of writing – including an entry from the Pulitzer winner Isabel Wilkerson – which took inspiration from Baldwin. Since then, there have been film festivals, exhibitions dedicated to Baldwin, and musical theatre inspired by his writing. The ball began rolling in 2014 with Columbia University’s year-long programme pegged to his 90th birthday. Peck’s film is the latest in a string of events and retrospectives that have put Baldwin back in the public imagination. ![]() In March, Taschen will publish a special edition of The Fire Next Time with images from Life magazine photographer Steve Schapiro. February sees the release of I Am Not Your Negro, a documentary by Haitian director Raoul Peck that takes Baldwin’s final, unfinished project – a book about the lives and murders of his friends Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers – as a starting point, before analysing Baldwin’s sometimes strained and difficult relationship with the civil rights movement. Thirty years since he died of stomach cancer in 1987, an expat in the south of France, there is reinvigorated interest in Baldwin and his ideas. ![]() His public image has been on a journey, from literary sensation with his debut novel Go Tell It on the Mountain in 1952 to his searing non-fiction work in the 60s that saw him revered as one of America’s most prominent public intellectuals. “Nothing had changed.” More than 50 years on, Baldwin’s words and philosophy have travelled thousands of miles from 110th street. “What I saw around me that summer in Harlem was what I had always seen,” he wrote. In the opening to his 1962 New Yorker essay Letter from a Region in My Mind, James Baldwin remembers walking around his neighbourhood of Harlem as a 14-year-old, wondering if his fate would trap him there. ![]()
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