James Baldwin and the Eruption of the Ethical (ACLA 2025)

In interview footage from 1963 curated by Karen Thorsen for The Price of the Ticket (1989) there is a scene wherein James Baldwin makes a claim about value: “From my point of view, no label, no slogan, no party, no skin color, and indeed no religion is more important than the human being.” Considering Baldwin’s “point of view” as a statement of humanist value that erupts in the literary this seminar invites contributions that address this eruption as integral to the ongoing vitality of Baldwin’s literary oeuvre in the centenary of his birth.  Indeed, one might argue that the continued relevance of Baldwin’s work is in part due to the ways in which he relentlessly critiques the constraints that culture and power impose on the possibilities of human being – constraints that at one point he called “the cage of reality” (Everybody’s Protest Novel).  Baldwin's critique instead fundamentally calls for an ethical defense and embrace of life, that is, a desire to affirm life and human being (what he calls its “beauty, dread, power”) against all efforts to deny and contain it.

This seminar aims to facilitate a substantive engagement with Baldwin’s literary works (novels, essays, plays, poetry, and short stories) as arising from an attention to an aesthetic of form affected by an eruption of an ethical impulse. Just as Baldwin’s demand for truth infuses an ethical demand into a traditionally epistemological endeavor, we are moved by the idea that Baldwin’s literary works are fundamentally intertextual by way of an ethical demand, but also by way of an alchemy of the literary with haptic, aural, visual and temporal registers. The seminar will be interested in the following questions: how Baldwin’s style and narrative form infused the demand of the ethical into the literary, and to what effect; how haptic and aural intertexts recast the body and its movement within and across intimate and geographical space; how Baldwin’s intertextual style enables readers to speculate about possibilities of living otherwise; how Baldwin’s transnational wanderings, committed cosmopolitanism, and embrace of literary figures from Dostoyevsky, Genet, James, and Dickens connect to an ethical concern for exceeding the limits of anyone national culture; how Baldwin’s style may itself be invested in staging scenes of psychic disruption that allow for the possibility of reconceptualizing selfhood,; and how Baldwin’s work continually grapples both with mourning, grief, sorrow, and loss while simultaneously seeking to expand our awareness of joy, beauty, love, and saying yes to life?