stranger in the village james baldwin essay

Notes of a Native Son

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Black Body: Rereading James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village”

By Teju Cole

Photograph by Ted ThaiThe LIFE Picture CollectionGetty

Then the bus began driving into clouds, and between one cloud and the next we caught glimpses of the town below. It was suppertime and the town was a constellation of yellow points. We arrived thirty minutes after leaving that town, which was called Leuk. The train to Leuk had come in from Visp, the train from Visp had come from Bern, and the train before that was from Zurich, from which I had started out in the afternoon. Three trains, a bus, and a short stroll, all of it through beautiful country, and then we reached Leukerbad in darkness. So Leukerbad, not far in terms of absolute distance, was not all that easy to get to. August 2, 2014: it was James Baldwin’s birthday. Were he alive, he would be turning ninety. He is one of those people just on the cusp of escaping the contemporary and slipping into the historical—John Coltrane would have turned eighty-eight this year; Martin Luther King, Jr., would have turned eighty-five—people who could still be with us but who feel, at times, very far away, as though they lived centuries ago.

James Baldwin left Paris and came to Leukerbad for the first time in 1951. His lover Lucien Happersberger’s family had a chalet in a village up in the mountains. And so Baldwin, who was depressed and distracted at the time, went, and the village (which is also called Loèche-les-Bains) proved to be a refuge for him. His first trip was in the summer, and lasted two weeks. Then he returned, to his own surprise, for two more winters. His first novel, “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” found its final form here. He had struggled with the book for eight years, and he finally finished it in this unlikely retreat. He wrote something else, too, an essay called “Stranger in the Village”; it was this essay, even more than the novel, that brought me to Leukerbad.

“Stranger in the Village” first appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1953, and then in the essay collection “Notes of a Native Son,” in 1955. It recounts the experience of being black in an all-white village. It begins with a sense of an extreme journey, like Charles Darwin’s in the Galápagos or Tété-Michel Kpomassie’s in Greenland. But then it opens out into other concerns and into a different voice, swivelling to look at the American racial situation in the nineteen-fifties. The part of the essay that focusses on the Swiss village is both bemused and sorrowful. Baldwin is alert to the absurdity of being a writer from New York who is considered in some way inferior by Swiss villagers, many of whom have never travelled. But, later in the essay, when he writes about race in America, he is not at all bemused. He is angry and prophetic, writing with a hard clarity and carried along by a precipitous eloquence.

I took a room at the Hotel Mercure Bristol the night I arrived. I opened the windows to a dark view, but I knew that in the darkness loomed the Daubenhorn mountain. I ran a hot bath and lay neck-deep in the water with my old paperback copy of “Notes of a Native Son.” The tinny sound from my laptop was Bessie Smith singing “I’m Wild About That Thing,” a filthy blues number and a masterpiece of plausible deniability: “Don’t hold it baby when I cry / Give me every bit of it, else I’d die / I’m wild about that thing.” She could be singing about a trombone. And it was there in the bath, with his words and her voice, that I had my body-double moment: here I was in Leukerbad, with Bessie Smith singing across the years from 1929; and I am black like him; and I am slender; and have a gap in my front teeth; and am not especially tall (no, write it: short); and am cool on the page and animated in person, except when it is the other way around; and I was once a fervid teen-age preacher (Baldwin: “Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, ‘the Word’—when the church and I were one”); and I, too, left the church; and I call New York home even when not living there; and feel myself in all places, from New York City to rural Switzerland, the custodian of a black body, and have to find the language for all of what that means to me and to the people who look at me. The ancestor had briefly taken possession of the descendant. It was a moment of identification, and in the days that followed that moment was a guide.

“From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came,” Baldwin wrote. But the village has grown considerably since his visits, more than sixty years ago. They’ve seen blacks now; I wasn’t a remarkable sight. There were a few glances at the hotel when I was checking in, and in the fine restaurant just up the road, but there are always glances. There are glances in Zurich, where I am spending the summer, and there are glances in New York City, which has been my home for fourteen years. There are glances all over Europe and in India, and anywhere I go outside Africa. The test is how long the glances last, whether they become stares, with what intent they occur, whether they contain any degree of hostility or mockery, and to what extent connections, money, or mode of dress shield me in these situations. To be a stranger is to be looked at, but to be black is to be looked at especially. (“The children shout Neger! Neger! as I walk along the streets.”) Leukerbad has changed, but in which way? There were, in fact, no bands of children on the street, and few children anywhere at all. Presumably the children of Leukerbad, like children the world over, were indoors, frowning over computer games, checking Facebook, or watching music videos. Perhaps some of the older folks I saw in the streets were once the very children who had been so surprised by the sight of Baldwin, and about whom, in the essay, he struggles to take a reasonable tone: “In all of this, in which it must be conceded that there was the charm of genuine wonder and in which there was certainly no element of intentional unkindness, there was yet no suggestion that I was human: I was simply a living wonder.” But now the children or grandchildren of those children are connected to the world in a different way. Maybe some xenophobia or racism are part of their lives, but part of their lives, too, are Beyoncé, Drake, and Meek Mill, the music I hear pulsing from Swiss clubs on Friday nights.

Baldwin had to bring his records with him in the fifties, like a secret stash of medicine, and he had to haul his phonograph up to Leukerbad, so that the sound of the American blues could keep him connected to a Harlem of the spirit. I listened to some of the same music while I was there, as a way of being with him: Bessie Smith singing “I Need A Little Sugar In My Bowl” (“I need a little sugar in my bowl / I need a little hot dog on my roll”), Fats Waller singing “Your Feet’s Too Big.” I listened to my own playlist as well: Bettye Swann, Billie Holiday, Jean Wells, “Coltrane Plays the Blues,” the Physics, Childish Gambino. The music you travel with helps you to create your own internal weather. But the world participates, too: when I sat down to lunch at the Römerhof restaurant one afternoon—that day, all the customers and staff were white—the music playing overhead was Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” History is now and black America.

Photograph by Teju Cole.

At dinner, at a pizzeria, there were glances. A table of British tourists stared at me. But the waitress was part black, and at the hotel one of the staff members at the spa was an older black man. “People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them,” Baldwin wrote. But it is also true that the little pieces of history move around at a tremendous speed, settling with a not-always-clear logic, and rarely settling for long. And perhaps more interesting than my not being the only black person in the village is the plain fact that many of the other people I saw were also foreigners. This was the biggest change of all. If, back then, the village had a pious and convalescent air about it, the feel of “a lesser Lourdes,” it is much busier now, packed with visitors from other parts of Switzerland, Germany, France, Italy, and all over Europe, Asia, and the Americas. It has become the most popular thermal resort in the Alps. The municipal baths were full. There are hotels on every street, at every price point, and there are restaurants and luxury-goods shops. If you wish to buy an eye-wateringly costly watch at forty-six hundred feet above sea level, it is now possible to do so.

The better hotels have their own thermal pools. At the Hotel Mercure Bristol, I took an elevator down to the spa and sat in the dry sauna. A few minutes later, I slipped into the pool and floated outside in the warm water. Others were there, but not many. A light rain fell. We were ringed by mountains and held in the immortal blue.

In her brilliant “Harlem Is Nowhere,” Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts writes, “In almost every essay James Baldwin wrote about Harlem, there is a moment when he commits a literary sleight-of-hand so particular that, if he’d been an athlete, sportscasters would have codified the maneuver and named it ‘the Jimmy.’ I think of it in cinematic terms, because its effect reminds me of a technique wherein camera operators pan out by starting with a tight shot and then zoom out to a wide view while the lens remains focused on a point in the distance.” This move, this sudden widening of focus, is present even in his essays that are not about Harlem. In “Stranger in the Village,” there’s a passage about seven pages in where one can feel the rhetoric revving up, as Baldwin prepares to leave behind the calm, fabular atmosphere of the opening section. Of the villagers, he writes:

These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State Building, should anyone here ever see it. Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory—but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive.

What is this list about? Does it truly bother Baldwin that the people of Leukerbad are related, through some faint familiarity, to Chartres? That some distant genetic thread links them to the Beethoven string quartets? After all, as he argues later in the essay, no one can deny the impact “the presence of the Negro has had on the American character.” He understands the truth and the art in Bessie Smith’s work. He does not, and cannot—I want to believe—rate the blues below Bach. But there was a certain narrowness in received ideas of black culture in the nineteen-fifties. In the time since then, there has been enough black cultural achievement from which to compile an all-star team: there’s been Coltrane and Monk and Miles, and Ella and Billie and Aretha. Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, and Derek Walcott happened, as have Audre Lorde, and Chinua Achebe, and Bob Marley. The body was not abandoned for the mind’s sake: Alvin Ailey, Arthur Ashe, and Michael Jordan happened, too. The source of jazz and the blues also gave the world hip-hop, Afrobeat, dancehall, and house. And, yes, when James Baldwin died in 1987, he, too, was recognized as an all-star.

Thinking further about the cathedral at Chartres, about the greatness of that achievement and about how, in his view, it included blacks only in the negative, as devils, Baldwin writes that “the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past.” But the distant African past has also become much more available than it was in 1953. It would not occur to me to think that, centuries ago, I was “in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive.” But I suspect that for Baldwin it is, in part, a rhetorical move, a grim cadence on which to end a paragraph. In “A Question of Identity” (another essay collected in “Notes of a Native Son”), he writes, “The truth about that past is not that it is too brief, or too superficial, but only that we, having turned our faces so resolutely away from it, have never demanded from it what it has to give.” The fourteenth-century court artists of Ife made bronze sculptures using a complicated casting process lost to Europe since antiquity, and which was not rediscovered there until the Renaissance. Ife sculptures are equal to the works of Ghiberti or Donatello. From their precision and formal sumptuousness we can extrapolate the contours of a great monarchy, a network of sophisticated ateliers, and a cosmopolitan world of trade and knowledge. And it was not only Ife. All of West Africa was a cultural ferment. From the egalitarian government of the Igbo to the goldwork of the Ashanti courts, the brass sculpture of Benin, the military achievement of the Mandinka Empire and the musical virtuosi who praised those war heroes, this was a region of the world too deeply invested in art and life to simply be reduced to a caricature of “watching the conquerors arrive.” We know better now. We know it with a stack of corroborating scholarship and we know it implicitly, so that even making a list of the accomplishments feels faintly tedious, and is helpful mainly as a counter to Eurocentrism.

There’s no world in which I would surrender the intimidating beauty of Yoruba-language poetry for, say, Shakespeare’s sonnets, nor one in which I’d prefer the chamber orchestras of Brandenburg to the koras of Mali. I’m happy to own all of it. This carefree confidence is, in part, the gift of time. It is a dividend of the struggle of people from earlier generations. I feel no alienation in museums. But this question of filiation tormented Baldwin considerably. He was sensitive to what was great in world art, and sensitive to his own sense of exclusion from it. He made a similar list in the title essay of “Notes of a Native Son” (one begins to feel that lists like this had been flung at him during arguments): “In some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the Stones of Paris, to the Cathedral at Chartres, and the Empire State Building a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage.” The lines throb with sadness. What he loves does not love him in return.

This is where I part ways with Baldwin. I disagree not with his particular sorrow but with the self-abnegation that pinned him to it. Bach, so profoundly human, is my heritage. I am not an interloper when I look at a Rembrandt portrait. I care for them more than some white people do, just as some white people care more for aspects of African art than I do. I can oppose white supremacy and still rejoice in Gothic architecture. In this, I stand with Ralph Ellison: “The values of my own people are neither ‘white’ nor ‘black,’ they are American. Nor can I see how they could be anything else, since we are people who are involved in the texture of the American experience.” And yet I (born in the United States more than half a century after Baldwin) continue to understand, because I have experienced in my own body the undimmed fury he felt about pervasive, limiting racism. In his writing there is a hunger for life, for all of it, and a strong wish to not be accounted nothing (a mere nigger, a mere neger ) when he knows himself to be so much. And this “so much” is neither a matter of ego about his writing nor an anxiety about his fame in New York or in Paris. It is about the incontestable fundamentals of a person: pleasure, sorrow, love, humor, and grief, and the complexity of the interior landscape that sustains those feelings. Baldwin was astonished that anyone anywhere should question these fundamentals, thereby burdening him with the supreme waste of time that is racism, let alone so many people in so many places. This unflagging ability to be shocked rises like steam off his written pages. “The rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless,” he writes, “but it is also absolutely inevitable.”

Leukerbad gave Baldwin a way to think about white supremacy from its first principles. It was as though he found it in its simplest form there. The men who suggested that he learn to ski so that they might mock him, the villagers who accused him behind his back of being a firewood thief, the ones who wished to touch his hair and suggested that he grow it out and make himself a winter coat, and the children who “having been taught that the devil is a black man, scream in genuine anguish” as he approached: Baldwin saw these as prototypes (preserved like coelacanths) of attitudes that had evolved into the more intimate, intricate, familiar, and obscene American forms of white supremacy that he already knew so well.

It is a beautiful village. I liked the mountain air. But when I returned to my room from the thermal baths, or from strolling in the streets with my camera, I read the news online. There I found an unending sequence of crises: in the Middle East, in Africa, in Russia, and everywhere else, really. Pain was general. But within that larger distress was a set of linked stories, and thinking about “Stranger in the Village,” thinking with its help, was like injecting a contrast dye into my encounter with the news. The American police continued shooting unarmed black men, or killing them in other ways. The protests that followed, in black communities, were countered with violence by a police force that is becoming indistinguishable from an invading army. People began to see a connection between the various events: the shootings, the fatal choke hold, the stories of who was not given life-saving medication. And black communities were flooded with outrage and grief.

In all of this, a smaller, less significant story (but one that nevertheless signified ), caught my attention. The Mayor of New York and his police chief have a public-policy obsession with cleaning, with cleansing, and they decided that arresting members of the dance troupes that perform in moving subway cars is one of the ways to clean up the city. I read the excuses for this becoming a priority: some people fear being seriously injured by an errant kick (it has not happened, but they sure fear it), some people consider it a nuisance, some policymakers believe that going after misdemeanors is a way of preëmpting major crimes. And so, to combat this menace of dancers, the police moved in. They began chasing, and harassing, and handcuffing. The “problem” was dancers, and the dancers were, for the most part, black boys. The newspapers took the same tone as the government: a sniffy dismissal of the performers. And yet these same dancers are a bright spark in the day, a moment of unregulated beauty, artists with talents unimaginable to their audience. What kind of thinking would consider their abolition an improvement in city life? No one considers Halloween trick-or-treaters a public menace. There’s no law enforcement against people selling Girl Scout cookies or against Jehovah’s Witnesses. But the black body comes pre-judged, and as a result it is placed in needless jeopardy. To be black is to bear the brunt of selective enforcement of the law, and to inhabit a psychic unsteadiness in which there is no guarantee of personal safety. You are a black body first, before you are a kid walking down the street or a Harvard professor who has misplaced his keys.

William Hazlitt, in an 1821 essay entitled “The Indian Jugglers,” wrote words that I think of when I see a great athlete or dancer: “Man, thou art a wonderful animal, and thy ways past finding out! Thou canst do strange things, but thou turnest them to little account!—To conceive of this effort of extraordinary dexterity distracts the imagination and makes admiration breathless.” In the presence of the admirable, some are breathless not with admiration but with rage. They object to the presence of the black body (an unarmed boy in a street, a man buying a toy, a dancer in the subway, a bystander) as much as they object to the presence of the black mind. And simultaneous with these erasures is the unending collection of profit from black labor. Throughout the culture, there are imitations of the gait, bearing, and dress of the black body, a vampiric “everything but the burden” co-option of black life.

Leukerbad is ringed by mountains: the Daubenhorn, the Torrenthorn, the Rinderhorn. A high mountain pass called the Gemmi, another twenty-eight hundred feet above the village, connects the canton of Valais with the Bernese Oberland. Through this landscape—craggy, bare in places and verdant elsewhere, a textbook instance of the sublime—one moves as though through a dream. The Gemmipass is famous for good reason, and Goethe was there, as were Byron, Twain, and Picasso. The pass is mentioned in a Sherlock Holmes adventure, when Holmes crosses it on his way to the fateful meeting with Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. There was bad weather the day I went up, rain and fog, but it was good luck, as it meant I was alone on the trails. While there, I remembered a story that Lucien Happersberger told about Baldwin going out on a hike in these mountains. Baldwin had lost his footing during the ascent, and the situation was precarious for a moment. But Happersberger, who was an experienced climber, reached out a hand, and Baldwin was saved. It was out of this frightening moment, this appealingly biblical moment, that Baldwin got the title for the book he had been struggling to write: “Go Tell It On the Mountain.”

If Leukerbad was his mountain pulpit, the United States was his audience. The remote village gave him a sharper view of what things looked like back home. He was a stranger in Leukerbad, Baldwin wrote, but there was no possibility for blacks to be strangers in the United States, nor for whites to achieve the fantasy of an all-white America purged of blacks. This fantasy about the disposability of black life is a constant in American history. It takes a while to understand that this disposability continues. It takes whites a while to understand it; it takes non-black people of color a while to understand it; and it takes some blacks, whether they’ve always lived in the U.S. or are latecomers like myself, weaned elsewhere on other struggles, a while to understand it. American racism has many moving parts, and has had enough centuries in which to evolve an impressive camouflage. It can hoard its malice in great stillness for a long time, all the while pretending to look the other way. Like misogyny, it is atmospheric. You don’t see it at first. But understanding comes.

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” The news of the day (old news, but raw as a fresh wound) is that black American life is disposable from the point of view of policing, sentencing, economic policy, and countless terrifying forms of disregard. There is a vivid performance of innocence, but there’s no actual innocence left. The moral ledger remains so far in the negative that we can’t even get started on the question of reparations. Baldwin wrote “Stranger in the Village” more than sixty years ago. Now what?

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James Baldwin's Stranger in the Village: An Essay in Black and White

Profile image of Oana Cogeanu

Rereading James Baldwin's famous essay "Stranger in the Village", this paper highlights for the first time Baldwin's dialectic representation of black-white relations as initiated in Europe and perfected in America. Starting from the observation that Baldwin comes to understand during his Swiss sojourn that the roots of his identity are to be found not in Africa, but in Europe, the paper offers a textual and cultural close reading of a text in which past confronts present and Africa confronts Europe in an American individual experience of cosmic dimension.

Related Papers

James Baldwin Review

Paola Bacchetta , Patricia Purtschert

“Baldwin’s Transatlantic Reverberations: Between ‘Stranger in the Village’ and I Am Not Your Negro.” Paola Bacchetta, Jovita dos Santos Pinto, Noémi Michel, Patricia Purtschert, and Vanessa Näf. James Baldwin Review, vol. 6., 176-198. (Fall 2020). James Baldwin’s writing, his persona, as well as his public speeches, interviews, and discussions are undergoing a renewed reception in the arts, in queer and critical race studies, and in queer of color movements. Directed by Raoul Peck, the film I Am Not Your Negro decisively contributed to the rekindled circulation of Baldwin across the Atlantic. Since 2017, screenings and commentaries on the highly acclaimed film have prompted discussions about the persistent yet variously racialized temporal-spatial formations of Europe and the U.S. Stemming from a roundtable that fol- lowed a screening in Zurich in February 2018, this collective essay wanders between the audio-visual and textual matter of the film and Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village,” which was also adapted into a film-essay directed by Pierre Koralnik, staging Baldwin in the Swiss village of Leukerbad. Privileging Black feminist, post- colonial, and queer of color perspectives, we identify three sites of Baldwin’s trans- atlantic reverberations: situated knowledge, controlling images, and everyday sexual racism. In conclusion, we reflect on the implications of racialized, sexualized politics for today’s Black feminist, queer, and trans of color movements located in continental Europe—especially in Switzerland and France.

stranger in the village james baldwin essay

African American Review

Gerald David Naughton

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: In titling their ambitious new volume James Baldwin: America and Beyond, editors Cora Kaplan and Bill Schwarz make a bold claim of inclusivity. As they state in their Introduction to the collection, “the salient point resides in the conjunction” (4): the key to understanding Baldwin in a global era is in analyzing how this extraordinary writer managed to embed the national in the transnational, and vice versa. “Our concern,” Kaplan and Schwarz state from the outset, “is how he imagined America and beyond” (4). The volume is thus more or less neatly cleaved into two sections: first, “What it Means to Be an American,” and then “A Stranger in the Village.” At their most successful, however, the scholars and intellectuals gathered in this collection eschew such easy distinctions, showing how inadequate clear divisions become when applied to a writer as rich, complicated, and paradoxical as James Baldwin. To give just a few examples from the volume (many would have been possible), we may turn first to Douglas Field’s essay “What is Africa to Baldwin?: Cultural Illegitimacy and the Step-fatherland” (209-28), which prominently situates his analysis of Baldwin’s attitude toward the culture and politics of Africa within a careful discussion of the writer’s early life as a preacher in Harlem and his decisive relationship with his father. Baldwin’s “complicated shifting views on Africa,” according to Field, are rooted in his “troubled relationship with his father” (210). This builds a biographical frame that situates Africa within Harlem, the political within the personal, and “beyond” within “America,” thus avoiding unhelpful dichotomies. Vaughn Rasberry’s” ‘Now Describing You’: James Baldwin and Cold War Liberalism” (84-105) similarly connects the national with the transnational; here, the locus of connection is the Cold War and its intimate (for Baldwin) links with civil rights-era racial discourse in the United States. Making such perceptive and unexpected connections was the very lifeblood of Baldwin’s political thought. Kevin Birmingham also outlines this in his essay,” ‘History’s Ass Pocket’: The Sources of Baldwinian Diaspora” (141-58), which explores the interplay of Israel and West Africa in establishing Baldwin’s national and transnational vision. In Birmingham’s view, “Baldwin discovered the complexity of the relationship between privacy and nationhood through a frame of reference that seems impertinent to both the private life and the national life: through his transnational life” (144). Such unlikely sources, unexpected connections, and paradoxical conjunctions are explored throughout the volume—new points of analysis which are essential if we are to genuinely expand our conception of Baldwin’s diverse and multifaceted legacy. It may be pertinent to note here that the project of broadening the critical focus on Baldwin is neither completely unique nor entirely new. James Baldwin: America and Beyond is, rather, the latest step in a project arguably initiated by the Dwight A. McBride-edited James Baldwin Now (1999) and D. Quentin Miller’s Re-Viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen (2000). Both of those texts expressed their discontent with what Miller described as the “frustrating” tendency of “literary criticism to fragment (Baldwin’s) vision” (233). More recent scholarship on the writer has continued to broaden our critical understanding of his vision and his writing—among the more prominent examples of this development, we may consider Magdalena J. Zaborowska’s James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (2008), Douglas Field’s James Baldwin (2011), and the Randall Kenan-edited The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (2011). All of these studies hinge on the conjunctions in Baldwin’s writing: the American and the transnational, the political and the aesthetic; the fiction and the nonfiction; the early works and the late works, et cetera. For too long, as Kaplan and Schwarz put it, “one Baldwin has been pitted against another Baldwin, producing a series of polarities that has skewed our understanding” (3). The collection under discussion here is, therefore, to be welcomed. And yet, we may ask ourselves why—despite the worthy efforts of volumes like those cited above—such critical rallying calls remain necessary. In one of the most dynamic essays in the collection, Robert Reid-Pharr (126-38) astringently argues that Baldwin scholarship, far from expanding...

Karoline Heien

Alexa Kurmanova

Oana Cogeanu

Ernesto Martinez

Contemporary Political Theory

Lisa A Beard

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.

Brigitte Pawliw-Fry

James Baldwin's short story, "Going to Meet the Man," fictionalizes the "personal incoherence" of white America that he describes in his essay, "The White Man's Guilt." Those "stammering, terrified dialogues" of incoherence manifest in the language used by Jesse, the protagonist, as he attempts to narrate his experience. Yet this "personal incoherence" plays a role in perpetuating racist violence, as Jesse's encounter with a lynching transforms him and his language, as he accepts the incoherence of his father's world view. Through this, Baldwin shows that vague and imprecise language is a tool in justifying, and thus perpetuating, white supremacy. But first, I will provide a reading of "The White Man's Guilt" to define what I mean by "personal incoherence" in the context of the short story, and will then explore the reading from scholar Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman of Baldwin's specific construction of white identity formation (723). After these sections, I will pursue a chronologic structure of Jesse's developments, which enacts his socialization process.

John E. Drabinski

Draft of an essay on James Baldwin's quasi-dialectical conception of racial formation. In particular, I focus on how white identity is structured by its own fantasy of blackness - a dialectic motivated by anti-black racism and its projection of identity. Baldwin's negative dialectic shifts focus from the play of anti-blackness to the remainder and remnant he calls "the Negro," an identity simultaneously inside and outside the dialectic of racial formation. This double-session of racial formation is Baldwin's account of the possibility of the positivity of Black life, an account that takes the nihilism of race realism seriously while also describing the formation of African-American culture outside that nihilism.

Film Quarterly

Warren Crichlow

Thirty years after James Baldwin's untimely death at the age of 63, Haitian-born Raoul Peck makes good on Baldwin's spirited prophecy through his timely and intrepidly titled I Am Not Your Negro (2016). In his rendezvous with Baldwin, Peck carries Baldwin's prescient voice into the twenty-first century, where his rhetorical practice of “telling it like it is” resonates anew in this perilous political moment. Drawing on his signature practice of reanimating the archive through bricolage, Peck not only represents but also remobilizes Baldwin's image repertoire, helping to conjugate the very idea of this revered—and often criticized—novelist and essayist to renewed effect. Like audiences of an earlier era, today's viewers become spellbound by this critical witness's fervent idiomatic eloquence and uncompromising vision. Crichlow argues that Baldwin's journey is palpably not over—perhaps just beginning. The film makes certain his illuminating prose and penetr...

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Notes of a Native Son

By james baldwin, notes of a native son summary and analysis of stranger in the village.

This essay begins by describing a small village (Leukerbad) in Switzerland where Baldwin stayed in the early 1950s. Before visiting this village, he had not realized that there were places in the world where no one had ever seen a black person. The village is small and located in the mountains, but it is not so inaccessible. The city of Lausanne is only three hours away and there is a mid-sized town at the foot of the same mountain. Tourists seeking a cure for their health problems come for the hot spring in the village. Baldwin came initially to stay for two weeks in the summer. He never thought he would return, but in the winter decided to settle there to write. There are few distractions in the village, and it is cheap.

Baldwin discusses people’s reactions to him in the village. Children shout “ Neger! Neger! ” after him in the streets. They point out his physical characteristics such as his hair, skin, and teeth. In response, Baldwin tries to be pleasant as he says he was taught in America. Yet he realizes that they are not doing this because they like him: “No one, after all, can be liked whose human weight and complexity cannot be, or has not been, admitted.” They do not treat him as human but as a “living wonder.” The village also has a custom of “buying” an African native and converting them to Christianity. Children also put on blackface during the Carnaval celebrations before Lent.

His experiences in this Swiss village lead Baldwin to more historical speculations. Referring to the Irish novelist James Joyce he writes, “Joyce is right about history being a nightmare—but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” He gives examples of how this history lives on inside people. For example, he describes white men arriving in an African village with intentions to conquer and the way black people would look with curiosity at how different the hair and skin of these strangers are from their own. However, the Europeans would only take this curiosity as a sign of their own superiority. The situation for Baldwin in this Swiss village is entirely different. He feels overpowered by white society but realizes they think very little about him: "whereas I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose culture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me, people who have cost me more in anguish and rage than they will ever know, who yet do not even know of my existence." The villagers' astonishment at his physical characteristics can do nothing but “poison [his] heart.”

Baldwin then makes the argument that individuals cannot be blamed for historical events much larger than themselves. European culture may have power over him, but these villagers did not singlehandedly create this culture. Yet they “move with an authority which I shall never have.” Even a remote village like this is comfortably part of the West. Even the most illiterate and uneducated among the villagers is closer, Baldwin argues, to the civilization of Dante, Shakespeare, and da Vinci than he is. He says that the famous cathedral at Chartres in France, or the Empire State Building in New York, would speak to them differently than to him. Comparing the ancestors of these villagers with his own, he writes; “Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory—but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive.”

These realizations cause rage within him, rage that cannot be conquered by the intellect. It cannot be hidden either but can only change shape. Each black person feels this rage, Baldwin argues, but each deals with it differently. It stems from a person’s “first realization of the power of white men.” It is also a rage against white innocence and naivety—their lack of awareness of the power they hold. Baldwin then discusses the legends that white society has about black people, as expressed by expressions “as black as hell.” He writes: "Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it." Yet he argues that these legends reveal more about the people who create them the people who they are mean to control and explain.

Baldwin returns to the village, describing how attitudes towards him both change and stay the same. Some children want to be his friend. Some of the elderly residents like chatting with him while others only look suspiciously. He compares these experiences to the ones he had in New York: "The dreadful abyss between the streets of this village and the streets of the city in which I was born, between the children who shout Neger! today and those who shouted Nigger! yesterday—the abyss is experience, the American experience."

This is followed by more historical reflections. Baldwin thinks back to the time when Americans were still Europeans and they came to a continent full of black people and thought “these black men [are] not really men but cattle.” The African-American slave was unique in having his entire past erased at once. While people in places like Haiti can sometimes trace their ancestry all the way back to kings, African Americans can only go back so far as a bill of sale—a receipt.

Yet African Americans have deeply shaped American society. The “Negro question” even led to civil war in the country. Europe never had to have this argument with the same explicitness. Europe’s colonies were always at a remove; they did not threaten European identity directly. Yet in America, where the slave was directly part of the society, one had no choice but to have an attitude towards race. All of this reveals “the tremendous effects the presence of the Negro has had on the American character."

The ideals of democracy on which the US was founded clashed with the reality of slavery. Establishing democracy on the American content was a radical move, Baldwin writes, but nowhere near as radical as finally opening up the concept to include black people. Yet white supremacy continues to threaten the most important value of the west, democracy. While white supremacy is everywhere, it is particularly loud and direct in the US. For Baldwin, this is caused by “the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself.” This necessity has led to all sorts of violence, like lynching, segregation, and terrorization. Yet the African American is a citizen: not a visitor but deeply embedded in the country. All these techniques of avoidance eventually fail. The white and black American have shaped each other and this search for a way of living together may eventually even contribute something new to the world.

In this famous essay, one of the most esteemed in the book, Baldwin ties together many of his important themes: being an African American in Europe, his relationship to Western culture, legends told about race, and the intertwined character of white and black in America.

Compared to Paris, Baldwin finds much more extreme attitudes towards him in this small Swiss village. Being in Europe pushes him to reflect on the roots of American culture, which go back to the Europeans who first began enslaving and selling people in Africa. This leads Baldwin to reflect on what Western culture means to him compared to what it means to the average white European. As Baldwin wrote in the introductory “Autobiographical Notes” to this book, he is a “bastard of the West.” Despite being shaped by this culture, he is in some respects outside of it.

In terms of the legends used to grapple with race, Baldwin again makes the important point that myths reveal more about the people who create them: “by means of what the white man imagines the black man to be, the black man is enabled to know who the white man is.” In this vein, the history of slavery, segregation, and racism are deeply revealing about the character of white American society. These phenomena show that America holds onto a fantasy that “there are some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist.” Baldwin works to deflate this illusion, arguing that African Americans have and remain central to the meaning of the country. The identity of both black and white depend on each other. Baldwin ends by looking at the larger world of the 1950s, in which African and Asian people all over the world are pushing for freedom from the European colonial powers (a process known as decolonization). In this changing world context, America may have something unexpected to offer the world: “It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again."

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Notes of a Native Son Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Notes of a Native Son is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Note of a Native Son by James

This is really asking for your opinion. I don't know what meant something to you. It is a personal question.

In what month and year do the events of the essay take place?

Notes of a Native Son is a collection of essays written and published by the African-American author James Baldwin. Your question depends on which essay you are referring to.

What is the author’s goal in this book? And what kind of effect does he want his book to have in the world?

Baldwin believes that one cannot understand America without understanding race. Yet this does not only mean looking at the experiences of African Americans, though this is crucial. Baldwin argues that the racial system in America (the history of...

Study Guide for Notes of a Native Son

Notes of a Native Son study guide contains a biography of James Baldwin, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

  • About Notes of a Native Son
  • Notes of a Native Son Summary
  • Character List

Essays for Notes of a Native Son

Notes of a Native Son essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin.

  • The Identity Crisis in James Baldwin’s Nonfiction and in Giovanni’s Room (1956)

Lesson Plan for Notes of a Native Son

  • About the Author
  • Study Objectives
  • Common Core Standards
  • Introduction to Notes of a Native Son
  • Relationship to Other Books
  • Bringing in Technology
  • Notes to the Teacher
  • Related Links
  • Notes of a Native Son Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for Notes of a Native Son

  • Introduction
  • Autobiographical notes

stranger in the village james baldwin essay

The Marginalian

Stranger in the Village: James Baldwin’s Prophetic Insight into Race and Reality, with a Shimmering Introduction by Gwendolyn Brooks

By maria popova.

stranger in the village james baldwin essay

The event, a recording of which is preserved in the Library of Congress archives, would be one of Baldwin’s last major public appearances. Brooks introduces him with these shimmering words:

You know the phrase larger than life . If that phrase is valid at all, it likes James Baldwin. This man has dared to confront and examine himself, ourselves, and the enigmas between. Many have been called prophets, but here is a bona fide prophet. Long ago, he guaranteed “the fire next time” — no more water, but fire next time. Virtually the following day, we, smelling smoke, looked up and found ourselves surrounded by leering, singing fire. I wonder how many others have regarded this connection. And, no, James Baldwin did not start the fire — he foretold its coming. He was a pre-reporter — he was a prophet. His friends enjoy calling him Jimmy, and that is easy to understand — the man is love personified. He has a sweet, soft, lay, loving, enduring smile. [Baldwin smiles, audience laughs]. He has a voice that can range from eerie effortless menace — menace educational and creative — to this low, cradling, insinuating, and involving love. This love is at once both father and son to a massive concern — a concern for his own people, surely, but for the cleansing, the extension of all the world’s categories. No less, surely, since he knows, surely, that the fortunes of these over here affect inevitably those over there. Essayist, novelist, poet, playwright, new French Legion of Honor medalist, human being being human: James Baldwin.

Baldwin proceeds to read from his work, beginning with the ending of an essay he had written more than three decades earlier, during his short stay in the small Swiss village of Leukerbad at the outset of his life in Europe, titled “Stranger in the Village” and later published in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction ( public library ). Composed in 1953 — the same cultural moment in which his compatriot and fellow prophet Rachel Carson was bringing her own prescience to the other great problem of their time , which also remains unsolved in ours — the essay stuns with its timeliness today and stands testament to Baldwin’s singular gift as a prophet and seer into past, present, and future.

Baldwin writes:

The cathedral at Chartres… says something to the people of this village which it cannot say to me; but it is important to understand that, this cathedral says something to me which it cannot say to them. Perhaps they are struck by the power of the spires, the glory of the windows; but they have known God, after all, longer than I have known him, and in a different way, and I am terrified by the slippery bottomless well to be found in the crypt, down which heretics were hurled to death, and by the obscene, inescapable gargoyles jutting out of the stone and seeming to say that God and the devil can never be divorced. I doubt that the villagers think of the devil when they face a cathedral because they have never been identified with the devil. But I must accept the status which myth, if nothing else, gives me in the West before I can hope to change the myth.

In a passage of bone-chilling prescience, affirming Zadie Smith’s insistence that “progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive,” Baldwin adds:

Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans can make. The identity they fought so hard to protect has, by virtue of that battle, undergone a change: Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be. I do not think, for example, that it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the world — which allows so little reality, generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life, which tends until today to paint moral issues in glaring black and white — owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged. It is only now beginning to be borne in on us — very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against our will — that this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless. For it protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of reality. People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

stranger in the village james baldwin essay

In a sentiment that reverberates with astonishing relevance three generations later, Baldwin — America’s poet laureate of “the doom and glory of knowing who you are” — concludes by framing the difficult reality we must face rather than flee from in order to nurture a nobler, healthier, and more just society:

The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

The Price of the Ticket — which also gave us Baldwin on the creative process , our capacity for transformation as individuals and nations , and his definition of love — remains an indispensable and indeed prophetic read. Complement it with Baldwin on resisting the mindless of majority , how he learned to truly see , the writer’s responsibility in a divided society , his advice on writing , his historic conversation with Margaret Mead about forgiveness and responsibility, and his only children’s book , then revisit Gwendolyn Brooks on vulnerability as strength and her advice to writers .

— Published November 19, 2018 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2018/11/19/gwendolyn-brooks-james-baldwin-library-of-congress/ —

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Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village” (1955)

June 3, 2020 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

stranger in the village james baldwin essay

“For this village, even were it incomparably more remote and incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted. These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modem world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State Building, should anyone here ever see it. Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory—but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive.”   –James Baldwin, “ Stranger in the Village ,” from  Notes of a Native Son (1955)

Read the full essay here .

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Researching Central Asia pp 57–64 Cite as

A Stranger in the Village: Anti-blackness in the Field

  • Alexa Kurmanov   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7665-3070 3  
  • Open Access
  • First Online: 14 October 2023

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Part of the SpringerBriefs in Political Science book series (BRIEFSPOLITICAL)

In 1951, James Baldwin visited the remote town of Leukerbad, Switzerland, which inspired his essay Stranger in the Village . Baldwin’s reflection of himself as a “first” encounter with Black flesh offers a critical reflection on overlooked discussions of the fatigue that accompanies Black researchers conducting fieldwork in (post)socialist spaces. In this chapter, I reflect on the ways my Black non-binary body becomes fatigued at the intersections of blackness and sexuality in the context of contemporary Kyrgyzstan. Furthermore, I address the sedimented representations of blackness that I embody, and the interactions my embodied (mis)representations invite, pushing us to think beyond the physicality of anti-blackness and to consider its psychological effects.

  • Central Asia
  • Anti-blackness
  • Black fatigue
  • (Post)socialist

Download chapter PDF

Introduction

Midway through 2022, I anxiously awaited Jessica Nabongo’s book The Catch Me If You Can: One Woman’s Journey to Every Country in the World. I was a follower of Nabongo’s Instagram account and eagerly anticipated reading about her travel as a Black woman through contemporary Central Asia. Her shaved head was important to me, because the combination of my bare scalp and being Black provoked unique and trying interactions with people in Kyrgyzstan. Recently, there has been an emerging genre of Black travel narratives on digital platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. These accounts show the complexity of being Black and abroad, many times as a way to encourage Black people in America to explore life’s possibilities outside of the United States. It serves as a digital Green Book Footnote 1 that clues Black populations into the scale of anti-blackness and racism they may encounter in particular countries (Klassen et al., 2022 ). However, before Nabongo and the emergence of digital Black travel narratives, it was nearly impossible to understand the complexity of being Black in Central Asia from a distance.

Before my first trip to Russia in 2018 and then Kyrgyzstan in 2019, I would search YouTube and other social media sites for guidance on how to navigate the social landscape. Often, these searches brought frustration because videos and blogs were limited to white men or white couples traveling through Kyrgyzstan. When I did locate the channels of Black vloggers, their explorations occluded Eurasia, especially Central Asia. Moreover, I could not see a reflection of myself, because many Black vloggers adorned themselves with “loose” wavy curls, braids, sew-ins, quick weaves, twist-outs, and seemed to neatly fit into (mis)representations of Black femininity. Although people are generally aware that blackness is not a monolith, and that race is not biological but a socially constructed reality, in the context of Kyrgyzstan, I embody various symbols of what Black is and is not . Aside from being visibly Black, I am queer and non-binary, which is at times revealed through my perceived gender expression. I say “perceived” because I am not openly non-binary or queer while in fieldwork, but nonetheless people project their own conceptualizations of gender and sex onto my body due to my shaved head and small physical frame. Thus, my positionality in fieldwork becomes deeply intertwined with inquiries in my research about the malleability and the fixedness of race, gender, sexuality, and their intersections and embodiment across space and time.

While reading Nabongo’s short chapter on Kyrgyzstan, I was reminded of the persistence of stereotypes about blackness through the tensions of being a person’s “first” encounter with Black flesh. On her walk to a mobile store to pick up a local sim card, she writes:

I often forget in many places that I stand out like a sore thumb. As Nazira and I walked to the mobile shop, I noticed traffic literally stop and people staring at me. I thought to myself, Oh yeah, I’m Black. I was a rarity in this region. Most people in the country, and especially in the countryside, had probably never seen a Black person in real life. It’s a surreal experience to be someone’s first. I felt both very aware of the eyes on me and also that the people staring were more fascinated than malicious. (Nabongo, 2022 , 233)

I empathized with her experience but also wondered if the stares were a combination of her closely shaved head and Black femmeness, as was the negative attention I experienced on previous trips abroad to Central Asia and Russia. In Nabongo’s account, I was reminded of the oscillation between rage and pleasantness in James Baldwin’s fatiguing encounters with curious inhabitants in a remote village in the Swiss Alps. Both Nabongo and Baldwin’s “first” encounters invited inquiry into blackness as both a subject and a question (Rankine, 2016 ). In short, what chaos ensues when blackness is the centre of inquiry? How did my body either “problematize” (Bey, 2020 ) or collapse into monolithic notions of blackness more broadly and American blackness in particular? What are the consequences of this ongoing antagonism?

This chapter is an inquiry into the tensions of being someone’s first. I invoke James Baldwin’s ( 1955 ) essay Stranger in the Village to point to cases of Black fatigue produced by naïve forms of anti-black and anti-gender logic in fieldwork. I engage Mary Frances-Winters definition of Black Fatigue, which she states is the “repeated variations of stress that result in extreme exhaustion and are caused by mental, physical, and spiritual maladies that are passed from generation to generation” ( 2020 , 33). This definition is based on the secondary meaning of fatigue, which involves the weakening of an object through repeated variations of stress. In short Frances-Winters’ notion of Black fatigue posits how physically, mentally, and emotionally taxing systemic and everyday racism is for Black people in the context of the United States. Because Frances-Winters’ definition of Black fatigue is shaped by the sociohistorical context of colonialism and racism in America, I use Baldwin’s experiences to expand her notion of Black fatigue internationally and to reflect on how naivety and curiosity about Blackness can leave “microscopic pinpricks” (Khanga & Jacoby, 1992 , 23). Another important concept in the context of Black fatigue is the concept of anti-blackness. Anti-blackness is defined as the “beliefs, attitudes, actions, practices, and behaviors of individuals and institutions that devalue, minimize, and marginalize the full participation of Black people” (Comrie et al., 2023 , 74).

I am aware that, by reflecting on Black fatigue and anti-blackness in fieldwork and its consequences, I risk reproducing a particular kind of “discourse of danger” (Heathershaw & Megoran, 2011 , 589) in the context of the Black experience abroad. Make no mistake, Kyrgyzstan has become a second home, and in many ways relieves me from the systemic racism of the United States. However, that does not mean that anti-blackness does not exist in the “social fabric” of geographies peripherised by Europe and the United States (Baldwin, 1955 ). My goals in this essay are, therefore, twofold. First, I aim to start a dialogue about being a Black researcher and student in the context of fieldwork in Central Asia. And second, I would like to turn attention to the innocence or “sublime ignorance” Black researchers and students encounter. My hope is that my experiences presented in this essay will not deter academic inquiry into Central Asia but be a tool for future Black researchers to think about their own positionality, at times as One-Third World (Mohanty, 2003 , 226), as they navigate fieldwork.

Being One’s First

In July 2019, Aliyu Tijjani Abubakar, a 38-year-old Nigerian man who lived and worked in Bishkek as the director of an English language school, was killed on the street near a local shopping centre ( Zum Aichurok ). Aliyu was on a video call with his wife when he noticed a young Kyrgyz man following him around and taking a video. The two men got into a verbal altercation afterward, which ultimately led to Abubakar being struck in the face and consequently hitting his head on the pavement—he died after being in a coma for a few days (Djanibekova, 2019 ). When I heard about Aliyu Abubakar, I had been in Kyrgyzstan for less than a month on a program funded through the US Department of State. Upset by the news of Abubakar’s murder, I reached out to my in-country program coordinator to discuss my anxiety about latent racism. She responded, using the logic of color blindness embedded in former nationality policies like Korenizatsiia (indigenization) and other policies like druzhba narodov (Russian term for “friendship of peoples”) during the Soviet period . “There is no racism here. Kyrgyz people are not racists,” she said.

I had heard a similar remark from in-country coordinators and instructors while abroad in Russia and Cuba. I was often accused of imposing my “American” view because the concept of race (for them) simply was non-existent in those spaces; thus, so were racism and anti-blackness. What struck me and upset me about Abubakar’s death was the moment that led up to it. It was impossible for me to read it as anything other than a fetishistic curiosity and inquiry into the Black body, which resulted in Abubakar’s assertiveness in protecting his personal boundaries. And, although his death sparked a tense debate about the existence of growing racist sentiments in Kyrgyz society, which reified the idea of racism as a foreign import, the sedimented experiences of Black fatigue that I had already experienced in the moments of “first” encounters left me unconvinced that his death was a random occurrence. July is the hottest month in Kyrgyzstan, especially in Bishkek, and even more so on the corner of Shopokov Ulitsia and Chuy Prospekt —tensions are running high. Abubakar lived in Bishkek for more than a decade. No doubt this was not the first time that someone had followed him around with their camera phone erect or snapping a photo, which to me solidified Abubakar’s position as always and forever a “stranger” or as a “wonder” (Baldwin, 1955 , 166). Although these exoticizing encounters can be seen as innocent and (at times) endearing, at their core, they are dehumanizing. In Baldwin’s encounters with the people of Leukerbad, their curiosity about his physical characteristics, which were the source of much pain in the context of America, saw these as both infernal and miraculous but never human. He recounts their comments about his hair as the “color of tar” (Baldwin, 1955 , 166) and its texture like wire or cotton. While these comments were a basis for genuine wonder, they misrecognized Baldwin’s humanity. “I knew that they did not mean to be unkind and I know it now; it is necessary, nevertheless, for me to repeat this to myself each time I walk out of the chalet” (Bladwin, 1955 , 166). Black Fatigue is present in Baldwin’s “first” encounters with the people of Leukerbad. However, Baldwin felt that he could not hold them accountable for “what history is doing or has done” (Baldwin, 1955 , 168). His oscillation between pleasantness and rage points to an active but slow fatiguing, an exoticizing of the Black body through gazing, naming, and touching.

Similar to Baldwin, my fieldwork was and continues to be filled with a variety of contentious “firsts” and the performance of “pleasantness” that involves carrying within the body the awkward weight of representation. Although the people of Leukerbad were aware that he was American, his Black body remained inevitably tied to a distorted image of Africa. “Everyone…knows that I come from America—though they will never really believe: black [people] come from Africa” (Baldwin, 1955 , 165). Inquiries about my “real” birthplace have previously reopened wounds and reminded me that I am indeed a “stranger”—even in Africa. “Where are you really from?” I am from Chicago. Yes, but where are you from ? This question, in particular, is loaded because it requires undoing the idea of Africa as a monolith—a continent seen as devoid of complexity. At times, I have had difficult but fruitful conversations that have come out of inquiries about my African heritage. For instance, on a taxi ride to Bishkek from the mountains, a couple inquired about my birthplace, and after giving a condensed lecture on the Atlantic Slave Trade, the husband then asked why I felt it important to travel to Kyrgyzstan when I should be traveling to Africa and help my African brothers? Although I took that opportunity to debunk the stereotype of Africa as “primitive” and “depraved” and soon shifted the conversation to his own views of colonial practice in Central Asia, I exited that conversation mentally and emotionally exhausted. Like Baldwin, I was aware that I could not hold him responsible for what he had unconsciously inherited (Baldwin, 1955 , 168). Not only have historical processes of racism and colonialism deployed “thousands of details, anecdotes, and stories” about blackness, it continues to do so on a global scale through various forms of digital media and the consumption of blackness as a commodity.

Black Fatigue and Anti-blackness

Often the entwinement between blackness, gender, and sexuality redresses my body as unintelligible. This is because I simply do not embody mainstream representations of Black femininity, which make Black women’s bodies legible. My shaved head (i.e., gender expression) betrays me, making me unable to live up to Black femininity—which is tied to hair—and all its excess. The reactions I get as a result of my hair and other parts of my body in fieldwork show just how paradoxical blackness can be. Suggestions about my inherent ability at physical activity, good sex, dancing, and singing are present in everyday conversations with complete strangers. My hair, which carries the particular weight and trauma of white supremacist logic in the context of the United States, frequently causes confusion about my gender. I do not “look” like the mainstream representations of Black women—Naomi Campbell, Beyonce, or Cardi B. I am flat-chested, short, and bald, but have been called some of these names because of my being both American and Black. Simultaneously, I have been called a gay man on the street. I have been both laughed at and complimented while walking with friends and family. Through the years, these instances have revealed to me that for many of the people I encounter in fieldwork, there is an inability to recognize my humanity. I am a reconfigured variant of a “controlling image” in highly marketable Black popular culture where ideas about Black sexuality are consistently “reformulated and contested” (Hill, 2004 , 121.) However, like Baldwin, I feel that I cannot hold them accountable for what history is doing and what it has done.

The experiences of being seen as a stranger are not unfamiliar to many Black people in America. And despite experiences that manifest in a variety of forms, such as microaggressions, overt racism, and systemic racism, that many Black Americans are subject to every day, whenever I tell someone that I am going abroad, they ask me if it’s safe for “us.” Meaning “Us” as in us Black people. My family usually tells me, with genuine concern and care to “be careful” and “stay safe” because of what they’ve heard about other global contexts. These interactions are not unique. Other Black scholars who do research in (post)socialist spaces have had the same conversations with family (St. Julian-Varnon, 2020 ). In fact, the inception of the blog chernyy kleb Footnote 2 (Russian for ‘black bread’), a site created by Imani Crawford, was made to ease her family’s anxieties about her safety as a Black woman abroad. She has since repurposed her blog as a pedagogical tool to help dispel “discourses of danger” pertaining to anti-blackness and racism that reproduce the idea that the United States is safer for Black people than other countries. Jessica Nabongo’s use of Malcolm X, invites us to consider how white supremacist logic enmeshed in “discourses of danger” continues to affect the mobility of Black bodies:

American propaganda is designed to make us think that no matter how much hell we catch here, we are still better off in America than we would be anywhere else. (Malcom X)

The fear of anti-blackness elsewhere has stopped many Black Americans from traveling abroad, and this includes Black researchers and students. The anxiety about anti-blackness and racism abroad is also coupled with systemic racism at “home” through access to privileges of travel. I did not receive my first passport until I was 26 years old. Footnote 3 And, similar to so many other Black researchers and students, when I finally traveled abroad, I rarely received adequate emotional support. Often, cohorts for study abroad programs were predominately white. The discussions at the orientations, both stateside and in-country, were a reflection of the cohort and was undergirded with the assumption that the experiences of students and researcher were universal—which meant White men/women. Furthermore, I found that, although I was physically outside of America, some students had carried a particular grain of American racism with them abroad, which was evident in their interactions with me and with the local community. Black fatigue was not only caused by interactions of inquiry about my body in the field but also by the complex makeup of the American cohort I was with. Moreover, this is compounded by the inability of the academic institution to recognize anti-blackness beyond the physical, as a practice that operates through a variety of other modalities, including academic institutions and state-funded programs that applaud themselves for being “diverse.”

While the context of Baldwin’s 1953 essay, set in the remote village of Leukerbad, Switzerland, is vastly different from that of contemporary Kyrgyzstan, in this essay, I find commonality in his encounter with the local population. The differences are not only temporal but also racial, ethnic, historical, and cultural. Leukerbad is a predominately White Swiss space, and Kyrgyzstan is a multi-ethnic (post)socialist and (post)colonial country. For me, this makes the question of how and where anti-blackness appears even more pertinent. What I like most about Baldwin’s analysis is that his status as a “stranger” in the village, which serves as a critique of White supremacy, does not essentialize racism in one context over another but blurs the geographical boundaries of anti-blackness. In other words, he is not only a stranger in Leukerbad but also at home in America. This point is key. One can thus step out of the racial matrix of the United States, perhaps in a search for a moment of reprieve, and still find that the “markers” that overdetermine their body follow them to other contexts, even in places with a history of “anti-racist” and “anti-colonial” policies (Spillers, 1987 ).

As a Black researcher who embodies various “markers” and who constantly questions and criticizes how race is discursively constructed and reified (Hall, 2017 ), I find that academic institutions are still failing to identify Black fatigue as an outcome of mundane encounters in fieldwork. Moreover, anti-blackness is not only limited to people of African descent in the United States or Europe but is prevalent in global contexts through logics of colorism, which privileges proximity to whiteness. Anti-blackness is not always explicit but can be practiced implicitly in the everyday. My hope is that my reflections presented here will draw more attention to how we all (not just Black scholars and scholars of color) can be equipped to be more supportive in cases in which anti-blackness is not always evident. Similar to others, I believe that we are on the right track toward supporting emerging Black scholars, but many programs and institutions overlook elementary forms of White supremacy that take place in fieldwork or study abroad.

The Green Book was a publication that offered a variety of resources to Black travelers from 1936 to 1966. Some of these resources included Black-friendly businesses, travel stories, civil rights advocacy, and guidance on safe traveling. Many scholars are (re)thinking and critically examining digital spaces as newer iterations of the Green Book, for instance, digital spaces such as Black Twitter.

For more details please visit the following website: https://blackbread.org/ .

The only way I was able to access a passport was through the CIEE passport caravan that came to the University of Pittsburgh in 2018. The caravan’s mission was to support students who have been historically underrepresented in study abroad programs.

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Kurmanov, A. (2024). A Stranger in the Village: Anti-blackness in the Field. In: Dall'Agnola, J., Sharshenova, A. (eds) Researching Central Asia. SpringerBriefs in Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39024-1_7

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Reading James Baldwin in an Election Year

James Baldwin in his apartment in New York, on Jan. 30, 1963.

T he evening James Baldwin stood in the pulpit of a New Orleans church in 1963, he carried little more than a single sheet of paper with his sporadic handwriting in blue ink on it. He began as he had always done: In silence, being engulfed by the applause of the room. A sort of expectation each one has arrived with.

In a picture taken of him that evening by photographer Mario Jorrin, Baldwin's body stood erect. He wears a dark suit. A white shirt, a black tie, and bends his chin toward the podium. The ceiling of the sanctuary seemed to climb toward the heavens as people stood crowded along the walls. There was hardly any room, a thing Baldwin had become used to since releasing The Fire Next Time earlier that year. That night, the faces of the attendees would bend toward one another—some laughed, some were stern, some were focused on the man at the pulpit, and others stared into nothing. They had all come to hear “God’s Black revolutionary mouth,” as Amiri Baraka called Baldwin.

Read More: James Baldwin Insisted We Tell the Truth About This Country. The Truth Is, We’ve Been Here Before

Baldwin’s frame was small, his clothes often hugged his skin. In most pictures that I have laying in my house, Baldwin smiles. I have chosen this for a reason. For years, it seemed that we have only known the angry Baldwin. That Baldwin’s thunderous appeal was only meant to break us down until we have nothing left. A foolish thing to believe any lover would do. There are four pictures, actually, four in which his cheeks spread far until they show his teeth. And yet, I know this too is a created thing. I have wanted to see him smile more than he cries. I have wanted to see him happy rather than sad. But I cannot deny this: that evening, Baldwin carried more than a paper and pen. He carried a broken heart.

James Baldwin addresses an audience in a church, Oct. 1963.

A soul-crushing anguish that things at home—and in the years since leaving Harlem—would not change. An anguish that almost emptied him of keeping the faith. A painful feeling that also travels from the center of my chest this morning and the morning before that and the morning before that. “Four AM can be a devastating hour,” Baldwin writes. The clock reads 4:32am. I have just taken a sip of the gunpowder green tea, have just finished the last page of John Hersey’s 1946 essay “Hiroshima,” have read the last line—"They were looking for their mothers"—three times, underlined it with black ink that bleeds through the next page, and have become more determined, as Baldwin has, “to bear the light.”

If you are like me and are concerned with history, grief, failure, and goodness—and the way each is woven together when we tell the story of how things unfold in our lives and the lives of others—then you, too, have stared at that black and white image. You have studied James Baldwin’s hands and his eyes, remembering that the year 1963 crawls in his psyche like a never-ending plague that overworks the ventricles of the heart. You have turned to the chronology in your well-worn copy of Baldwin’s collected essays edited by Toni Morrison and see that the year 1963 was full of travel and meetings and reportings on lynching and dancing and trembling.

In the midst of all of this travel, you would realize that Baldwin had been hospitalized for what doctors call “exhaustion.” That he felt it impossible to stop because of the demands of the world. That he felt it impossible not to speak because of his broken heart. That “exhaustion” is but another word for love when you are deemed unloveable and invaluable and have refused to believe it. That you feel what Baldwin has felt and therefore have taken his essays with you everywhere because a well-worn copy of essays is somewhat an indicator of a mind that wrestles, a heart that moves, and a body that feels.

I, too, have wondered about the same world , some 60 years later, with the same type of dying in and around us. As I write these words, I am sitting at my desk at home while my daughter, Ava, is asleep upstairs. The news says the numbers of children, women, and men dead in Gaza has eclipsed almost 30,000. The streets in New York and Washington, D.C. have been filled with people crying for justice . In January, President Joe Biden stood at the pulpit at Mother Emmanuel AME , where a protester demanded a ceasefire, and the crowd responds “Four more years,” silencing the cries for dignity and protection. A few weeks before that, a rabbi stood in a crowd of people demanding the same and was met with, “Get out of here!” Neighborhoods have been flattened. Aid has been cut off. Hatred is growing . Politicians are in denial about whether or not this country was born out of anti-Black racism . I find it hard to feel anything wondering what would come of this next election year.

How do we grieve where we are now when so much has been lost? It’s in these moments that I think about Baldwin often—that I feel Baldwin’s heart and mind can be a creative force to give me the hope that I often don’t feel and the courage to allow my heartbreak to break me open instead of close me up. I think that if there is anyone to lead us through an election year—to help us ask the right questions, make the right demands, fight the good fight, and stay human—it is James Baldwin.

I think of 1963, a year that is everything but a normal year in American history. By January, the same month Baldwin wrote his intimate and thunderous appeal, 16,000 American military personnel were deployed to South Vietnam in an unjust war . By February, the fiery napalm and smoke incinerated both the bodies and fields along the Perfume River. By April, 90-year old Dorothy Bell waited for a table that never came and was eventually arrested. By May, police dogs were ripping into the rib cage of a 70-year-old black man in protest. By June, Medgar Ever ’s back was split open as he bled to death in front of his wife and children. By August, burnt crosses stood illuminating the doorstops of a black family who moved into an all white neighborhood. By September, some 19 sticks of dynamite shredded the ligaments of five black girls, killing them instantly, and injuring some 20, blowing out the face of the stained glass Christ that sat behind the choir’s seating.

Read More: How Liberal White America Turned Its Back on James Baldwin in the 1960s

I have studied the image that Jorrin had taken of Baldwin that same year. The image is silent. Baldwin does not smile. His hands do not move. And yet, the image is as loud as the words he wrote in his 1963 letter to his nephew, “the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon.”

I have been thinking a lot about this image and the 60 years that has passed since this moment. The facts are this: the world is neither more safe or more healed than when he left it. The world is neither more loving or more honest or more healthy than when he was born in it. The same racism, hatred, death, and religious bigotry that Baldwin wanted us freed of in his time destroys us in our time. And yet, there is something about our time that feels different. (I am partly tired of hearing people say this moment is unprecedented because, you know, looking back through history, things have always been bad. But a part of me wonders if they are not the foolish ones, but me.) It feels different because the forces that want the world to stay the same are growing stronger. And at the same time, the inner willingness to believe that things can change, is growing deeper.

This image lingers because I too stand behind the sacred desk declaring the good news of God’s love and liberation. I too return to the blank page to feel, as Baldwin says, “what it is like to be alive.”

If there is anything that on my part and in these days that I have crawled back to, it is the way that Baldwin, as Morrison wrote in her eulogy to him, gave us language to articulate our perils, to deeply understand our place in the world not simply as humans but as people who come from a battered and worn and complex history. None of the villains and heroes in Baldwin’s mind seem quite black and white. Baldwin knew that villainy, especially of the American kind that is so double-minded and unstable in our ways about what matters and who counts, is not a given. It is chosen. And if it is chosen, then we can choose the better. This better, Morrison so beautifully articulates, is the way Baldwin so fearlessly and tenderly laid out of condition and the redemptive energy that lays at the center of it. “You went into that forbidden territory and decolonized it,” Morrison wrote. “and ungated it for black people, so that in your wake we could enter it, occupy it, restructure it in order to accommodate our complicated passions.” For Morrison, Baldwin was more than anything, full of that sacred wisdom, courage, and love that leaves us both to “witness the pain you had witnessed” and yet “tough enough to bear while it broke your heart.”

I have found myself being most concerned as of late with the things that broke Baldwin’s heart. It is not because I am obsessed with the dark side of the man who gave so much of his energy in 1963 to do what he must to make us more whole and honest and loving. It is because some 60 years later, it seems as if, on the one hand, we are so obsessed with running from grief that to deal with it is to almost give up hope because of the mountain of moral failure we feel we have to climb. And then on the other, we are living in a country where people seem to be addicted to the suffering of others.

They do not care whether your body or your brain is exhausted , they only desire your labor. They do not care whether you are you have rights or freedoms, they only care that they have them and have the power to take yours away. They do not care about your children or their children or this planet or the past or the present or the future. They only care about now and harming as many people now with as little accountability as possible.

There are days, I wonder if any of us can survive all of this. I wonder if seeing images of dead children, rage-filled desires to shred our common humanity, social media’s constant altering of our own self-image and love, the eroding of social trust and morality, the lying, the greed, the bigotry, the sleepless nights, all of it—I wonder if we can survive it.

American society for all its declarations of freedom and justice had become nothing more than empty promises and empty hopes and a “series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors, ” Baldwin wrote in October 1963, in a talk to teachers . The citizen who calls into question those, like the Good Samaritan story in the Christian Scriptures, who pass by people in need is not championed but silenced and erased. This was a cruelty, in Baldwin’s mind, of the highest order. Take the Black child and the Black adults fight for their freedom. “It is not really a Negro Revolution that is upsetting this country,” he wrote. “What is upsetting the country is a sense of its own identity.” For many in his time and even now 60 years later, the same thing is true: there is a fight to violently hold on to “American” meaning white and Christian and straight and male. For all the talk of America being a “Christian nation,” it was not just a lie, but the term “Christian nation” had become a weapon. This, too, was a deep and depressing cruelty.

James Baldwin smiles while addressing a crowd participating in the march from Selma to Montgomery in support of voting rights, Alabama, March 1965.

Throughout his talk, Baldwin kept alluding to this idea of bad faith both as a way of being together but also bad faith as a way of living. “We understood very early that this was not a Christian nation,” he says. “It didn’t matter what you said or how often you went to church …my father and my mother and my grandfather and my grandmother knew that Christians didn’t act this way.”

When I read that line, I couldn’t help but think of what is happening right now in this country. I have thought so hard and so often about how sad it is that we live in a country where Christians have the most power, but believe they are experiencing the most pain. It’s sad that we have become so empty of not just compassion but of mercy, kindness, wisdom, and goodness. As I’ve flipped through my underlined pages of Baldwin’s text, I shook my head side to side and came to this conclusion:if anybody is making it hard to be an American and a Christian, it is Christians.

“All of these means that there are in this country tremendous reservoirs of bitterness which have never been able to find an outlet,” Baldwin posits. Sadly, that bitterness has now shown up in the most destructive and deceptive ways. And yet, that is not all Baldwin had seen. When the mind is confused, full of doubt, and discouragement, the eye must be insistent in its power to see.

After having talked about the teacher and student’s responsibility to do what we must to responsibly love one another, Baldwin turns particularly to say a word about what he would say to a black child if he were to teach them day in and day out. He would teach them that the environments that they have been forced into is not of their own doing, but that of a power that has sought to destroy them. There are no “good” kids or “bad” kids ultimately, only the conditions that mark them as such and rob the “bad” kids of their humanity and dignity.

He would teach them that their lives, their art, their history, and their story is greater than the ways this country believes them to be backward and nothing. He would teach them that the stereotypes of the world are powerful and yet not ultimate. And then the famous line: “I would try to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger—and that it belongs to him.”

Read More: James Baldwin and the Trap Of Our History

I have read this line and thought of my own two children. I think of all children, truly. Children who are black as my own. Children who are Palestinian. Children who are Jewish. Children who are Asian. Children who are Hispanic, and gay and straight and athletic and quirky and in wealthy districts and left behind in enclaves. I think of them so much because, as one African proverb says, the health of the nation is dependent on the condition of its children.

I think of their growing minds and the fears that I have of what they will have to enter. How little do they know what actually awaits them and how furiously I have stayed up into the late hours of the night either praying or reading or writing in some way to prepare them. I think of my own upbringing. Our small plot of land. How little was expected of us and how much of this world we both endured and made. As a parent, I have found so much peace in those last six words: “and it belongs to him.”

Two nights ago, as I sat alone at my table reading over his talk for the third time, I took a sip of my chamomile tea as I listened to Hammock’s “We Watched You Disappear” in the background. The outside had darkened as the clouds from today’s rain passed over. I walked upstairs, noticing the chill bounce of the walls. I kiss both of my children on their foreheads as they sleep. I walk downstairs, walk back to my office, and stare at another picture from 1963 of Baldwin during his travels.

In the picture, his arms form in the position of a “T” as his body bounces side to side. The walls are bright. A painting which looks to depict an ancient time hangs on the wall. Baldwin’s eyes hang downward as the cracks of his lips widen. Doris Castle, an active organizer on the front lines of the Civil Right movement with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) stands in front of Baldwin with her torso forward, her arms like a bird’s wings, her right thumb toward the ceiling and her left index finger holding a cigarette. It was the same year that Castle protested a segregated New Orleans City Hall cafeteria. It was the same year that Baldwin went on a crusade to change the heart of the nation. In the photo, he smiles. She dances. It is said that both of them are doing the “Hitch Hike”—a dance popularized the year before with Marvin Gaye’s 1962 hit by the same name. The dance goes like this: thumb out, start to the right, four count, one, two, three, four, throw the shoulder back, left thumb out, start to the left, five, six, seven, eight, bend down, roll the hands, and turn to the left and turn to the right. And then again and then again until you are so lost together that you almost forget that a hitch hiker is a person in desperation, putting themselves in danger, hoping that they arrive where they desire as whole.

There is room made in the world, the burning and bleeding world of 1963, to dance and be joyful. There are times I wonder, as I look at this picture of both Baldwin and Castle, if their dancing kept them going. I wonder if it was their movement that let them know that their lives were more than just producing things and fighting things. To know that their existence is enough. To know that whatever good they did out there was a reflection of the good they protected in their hearts.

I have no answer to that question but something about these two images—Baldwin preaching his good news in the church and dancing his heart happy in a home—remind me that Baldwin left more than a broken heart. He left us a beating heart. “My ancestors counseled me to keep the faith : and I promised, I vowed, that I would,” he wrote. I, too, have made that vow. I, too, have watched my own children dance, twirl their bodies around the dying grass, laughing and holding hands. I, too, have watched people take the streets once again to say to the world: if they can’t be free, then we can’t be free. I, too, have watched the artist and poets among us move their tender fingers toward the keyboard and the page, determined to create against all hope. I, too, have watched how we have done something as simple as cried at the sight of one human being helping another, trusting that every good deed can be multiplied. A broken heart isn’t the only type of heart.

There is also a heart that with every act of courage, tenderness, vulnerability, kindness, and mercy, moves forward.

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On the left, snippets of the book jacket for “Go Tell It on the Mountain” are placed over a blue background. On the right, a black and white portrait of James Baldwin. He is seated and is wearing a collared shirt, tie and knitted vest.

The Essential James Baldwin

He wrote with the kind of clarity that was as comforting as it was chastising. Here’s where to start.

Credit... Jean-Regis Rouston/Roger Viollet, via Getty Images

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By Robert Jones Jr.

Robert Jones Jr. is the author of the novel “The Prophets.”

  • Feb. 28, 2024 Updated 11:35 a.m. ET

James Baldwin would have turned 100 on Aug. 2 this year. His final works were published almost 40 years ago, just two years before his death in 1987 . Yet his writing is as imperative as ever. He wrote with the kind of moral vision that was as comforting as it was chastising — almost surely the influence of the pulpit he once occupied as a child preacher in his native Harlem.

Baldwin never went to college, but he read, by his own count, every book in the library . Remarkably, he never received any of the major literary awards. But he wrote with grace and aplomb across genre: essay, novel, short story, song, children’s literature, drama, poetry and, infamously, screenplay. I say infamously because he was hired to write the script for a Malcolm X biopic, which he did reluctantly. Hollywood made it into a documentary instead and then never released it , leaving Baldwin to publish it himself in book form, as “ One Day When I Was Lost .”

Few people are as eloquent with the pen as Baldwin was. He returned again and again to central themes: compassion, radical honesty, and his insistence that we “ grow up .” Even after leaving the United States for France in the 1940s, hoping to escape the pervasive anti-Blackness he had experienced and witnessed, he was a fierce observer of race and culture in America. There is as much spiritual intensity as academic rigor in his books, along with a sense that he was trying to capture something as large as life with his words. That wrestling manifested itself in the length of some of his sentences ( one totals 321 words ). He sacrificed nothing — not style, not substance, not clarity, not beauty, not wisdom — except brevity.

All of his writing — no matter how pointed, critical or angry — is imbued with love. As someone who understood that love is key to liberation, he committed himself to the herculean task of persuading the rest of us. In the documentary short “ Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris ,” he says: “Love has never been a popular movement and no one’s ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together — really it is held together — by the love and the passion of a very few people.”

But alongside his deep affection for humanity was the abiding despair that attends when someone has decided to be a particular kind of witness, that is to say a prophet, which Baldwin certainly was — not because he could foretell the future, but because as an enormously astute observer of human behavior, he could make connections that escaped everyone else. As he said so sublimely in his 1972 memoir, “ No Name in the Street ”: “Every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.”

Baldwin’s sexuality and the role it played in his writing are too often overlooked or minimized. Existing at this intersection of identities blessed him with empathy and nuanced insight. He described it simply: “I loved a few women, I loved a few men. That was what saved my life.” But he never truly identified as bisexual, homosexual, gay or queer because he thought it was bizarre to distinguish those realities from more socially acceptable ones.

He also felt that the American movement for gay rights contained the same biases against Black people as those in mainstream society. “I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger unexpectedly,” he told The Village Voice in 1984. “Now that may sound very harsh, but the gay world as such is no more prepared to accept Black people than anywhere else in society.”

Today, you can find Baldwin’s words emblazoned on T-shirts, painted on murals and plastered across social media. Even divorced from their greater context, they still hold tremendous weight. I am forever linked to Baldwin, and not only because of his profound influence on my work. Thanks to my former Twitter alias, “ Son of Baldwin ,” something I said on the site back in 2015 will likely always be misattributed to him and I don’t mind. After all, he’s given me more than I could ever hope to repay.

Above all else, Baldwin’s work is a mirror — for the things we don’t want to see about ourselves, but also for our potential. Maybe I’m a cynic, but I sense we will never live up to the standards he hoped we would. But he, ever the optimist, even within his own grief, truly believed we could.

The book cover for “Go Tell It on the Mountain” features a line drawing, done in frantic, anxious strokes, of a man looking toward the right edge of the book.

Where should I begin?

“Go Tell It on the Mountain” (1953) is Baldwin’s first novel. It is a semi-autobiographical account of a young man named John, his family, his friends, his neighborhood, his church and the Black American journey from the South to the North known as the Great Migration. Nearly biblical in its tenor, it is a kind of gospel. The novel is interspersed with the lyrics and music of Black Christian traditions and reaches a fever pitch during the final section of the book, “The Thrashing Floor.” That’s where Baldwin is describing what it looks like, what it feels like, what it sounds like when someone catches the Holy Ghost. Here, he accomplishes the literary equivalent of speaking in tongues. The language is extraordinary:

Ah, down! — and to what purpose, where? To the bottom of the sea, the bowels of the earth, to the heart of the fiery furnace? Into a dungeon deeper than Hell, into a madness louder than the grave? What trumpet sound would awaken him, what hand would lift him up? For he knew, as he was struck again, and screamed again, his throat like burning ashes, and as he turned again, his body hanging from him like a useless weight, a heavy, rotting carcass, that if he were not lifted, he would never rise.”

I’ve heard people describe this novel as strange. I think what they were responding to was its covert queerness. John and his teenage friend and fellow parishioner, Elisha, never do anything overtly sexual, but the heat between them radiates off the pages; and their desperation to touch each other (which they do under the guise of play-fighting) and be near each other is palpable, electric and radiant. This novel opens the door for readers to understand the kind of writer Baldwin would become as well as the experiences that shaped his craft.

I’d like a groundbreaking love story

Nearly 70 years ago, Baldwin wrote a novel about a romance between two men. That might not seem like such a big deal now, but then, it was practically unheard of.

“Giovanni’s Room” (1956) takes place in Paris during the 1950s and details the story of an American expatriate named David, who meets Giovanni, an Italian bartender, at a gay bar. The two become friends and, eventually, lovers. But there’s a problem: David has a girlfriend. What is both beautiful and agonizing about the story is how the reader is forced to contend with David’s deep insecurities. He is attracted to Giovanni, but despises Giovanni (and himself) for it.

In characteristically thought-provoking precision, Baldwin links misogyny and anti-queerness. David’s hatred of feminine qualities in men and Giovanni’s hatred of women mirror each other, and expose how David’s self-loathing impacts his relationship to women and Giovanni’s misogynist views mask his own self-hatred. The more sharply their paths diverge, the more they intersect. And as we are led to a heart-shattering conclusion where David must choose between Giovanni and his girlfriend, Hella, and Giovanni faces life-threatening consequences, we are left to wonder which of their fates is worse — or if they are, in fact, two sides of the same coin.

I want something that will rattle my soul

“The Fire Next Time” (1963) is probably Baldwin’s most popular book. It begins with a letter written to his nephew James, in which Baldwin implores his namesake not to believe any of the negative things white supremacists have to say about him; that what they say about him actually reveals what they really feel about themselves. “Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your humanity but to their inhumanity and fear,” he wrote.

In the book’s more substantive essay, “Down at the Cross: Letter From a Region in My Mind,” he turns his critical eye on Christianity and sits down in conversation with Elijah Muhammad, then the leader of the Nation of Islam. He reflects on these encounters and concludes that ultimately, religion serves as a divisive force — that it invests human beings with false senses of superiority, that white people’s hostilities and Black people’s resentments of those hostilities will perhaps lead to race wars and possibly the destruction of the nation. “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, more loving,” he writes. “If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of him.”

For Baldwin, the only thing that might help us avoid these dire fates is love. Not the romantic or commercial kind, but the radical kind in which folks are called upon to really love their neighbors, by which Baldwin meant through actions, not feelings. And his assessment comes, in the final pages, as a warning, as a clarion call that, still to this day, reverberates off the walls and rattles the soul.

Give me something short, but powerful

Along with “The Fire Next Time” and “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “Sonny’s Blues” (1957) is one of Baldwin’s best-known works. It is a short story that details the relationship between two brothers in Harlem: an unnamed teacher who narrates the story, and a jazz pianist named Sonny. Both are war veterans (Baldwin never says which conflict), and one brother struggles with addiction, while the other tries to figure out why. But the story isn’t merely a safari through the miseries and fleeting moments of reprieve in Black people’s lives. That may be the backdrop, but in the foreground Baldwin explains to us, in ways that are wholly astonishing, the nature of music itself.

It’s not just that he writes what is probably the most accurate description of what music can sound like. He illustrates where it comes from and what it feels like. The narrator shares his thoughts while in a nightclub to see Sonny and his bandmates perform for the first time.

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air.

The story is filled with other sounds: street gospel, bluesy jukeboxes and whistling children. It’s one of those classics where you come for the lyrics, but stay for the beat.

I’d like a prescient work of fiction

“If Beale Street Could Talk” (1974) was the first novel by Baldwin to be adapted into a major motion picture . And it’s easy to see why. Though it was written and is set in the 1970s, its themes regarding the troubled relationship between Black people and the police are, unfortunately, timeless. Its plot could as easily be a headline in 2024 as 50 years ago.

This is the story of Tish and Fonny, two young Black people who fall in love, and who are violently separated when Fonny is falsely accused of rape. Even when describing the novel’s most harrowing aspects, Baldwin always puts love front and center. Tish, the main narrator, tells the reader early on, “I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.” That one sentence might be the novel’s thesis statement as Baldwin navigates the havoc that a carceral system wreaks on families, how it steals time and touch, and how love is likely the only thing that can withstand such an assault.

What’s most frightening about this story is the casual way in which Baldwin conveys the injustice: It seems routine for a Black man to be falsely accused, and for society to be eager to find him guilty of a crime he didn’t commit. It’s all very heavy but feels very contemporary, which suggests that society has not evolved as much as it may think it has. The story’s ending, which mirrors our current circumstances, is proof. Baldwin was masterly at giving voice to that melancholy, but never without some kind of gesture toward the light.

What is his most underrated book?

In the essay collection “The Devil Finds Work” (1976), Baldwin recalls his lifelong love affair with movies, critically analyzing both contemporary films and those of his childhood. He discusses his first impressions of actors like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, his suspicion of a kind of gangster archetype (as played by actors like Humphrey Bogart), Hollywood’s propensity for white savior narratives and stereotypical depictions of Black people and his own run-in with the Hollywood machine. All the while, he weaves in comparisons to literary classics by Faulkner, Shakespeare and others.

The standout pieces include a biting analysis of “The Defiant Ones,” about two escaped prisoners, and a sympathetic evaluation of the Billie Holiday biopic “Lady Sings the Blues,” which he initially detested. But the pièce de résistance is his review of “The Exorcist.” Baldwin was one of the few critics at the time who was not wowed by the film. He outlines how he and a friend went to see it at his friend’s insistence, after hearing all the national hype about people vomiting, passing out and running from the screenings. None of this impresses Baldwin. He puts it bluntly: “The mindless and hysterical banality of the evil presented in ‘The Exorcist’ is the most terrifying thing about the film.” He continues, “Americans should certainly know more about evil than that; if they pretend otherwise, they are lying, and any Black man, and not only Blacks, many, many others, including white children, can call them on this lie; he who has been treated as the Devil recognizes the Devil when they meet.”

“The Devil Finds Work” is an exhilarating and underrated exemplar of cultural criticism.

Show me an example of how the past informs the present

“The Evidence of Things Not Seen” (1985) chronicles Baldwin’s agonizing trip to Atlanta to report on the Atlanta child murders , where two dozen children, mostly Black boys, were taken by a serial killer between 1979 and 1981.

I’m not certain how many people remember this underexamined blemish on the nation’s skin, but as a Black child alive during this era, I was petrified, thinking that I would be snatched up any minute, even though I lived hundreds of miles from the scenes of the crimes.

“Evidence” is not a hard-nosed, true-crime assessment, nor does it try to glamorize its subject. Instead, what these heinous acts opened up for Baldwin was his ability to look critically at the history that led the nation to these moments: the human condition, the condition of the human heart and the pathologies that render Black people, especially Black children, worthless in the country’s imagination. He saw no difference between the Atlanta child murders (and the country’s response to them) and the murder of Emmett Till, and viewed them as an outcome of racism endemic to America. He felt this even though Wayne Williams, a Black man, was eventually convicted of the killings. The general feeling of the Black people who spoke to Baldwin was that white people “win when a Black person can” kill Black children.

Baldwin found Williams to be a bizarre character, though. And he felt the investigation and trial were rushed, incomplete and haphazard at best. At worst, they were just further attempts to pin a crime, any crime, on the nearest Black patsy. And yet — he couldn’t be Baldwin unless he was able to do this — he remained committed as ever to the idea that if there was any place in the world where true liberation from oppression was possible, it would be in America.

His final analysis, to no surprise, rests on the power of love. If only we dared to love ourselves and one another enough to bring it to fruition.

A Guide to Black History Month

The monthlong celebration honors how african americans have shaped the united states through both triumphs and trauma..

Carter G. Woodson’s house, the birthplace of Black History Month, was a hub of scholarship, bringing together generations of intellectuals, writers and activists .

Wondering how Black History Month  came to be? Learn about the history of this celebration .

Dig deeper with the 1619 Project , an initiative by The Times Magazine that aims to reframe America’s history by placing the consequences of slavery at the very center of the nation’s narrative.

Expand your knowledge with Black History, Continued , our project devoted to pivotal moments and transformative figures in Black history.

Explore Black love in all its forms and expressions with this collection of heart-warming stories .

Celebrate the contributions of Black authors to literature by diving into the works of Octavia Butler  and Toni Morrison .

Over the years, many important African American landmarks have disappeared or fallen into disrepair. Here are eight historical sites  that are being preserved.

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  1. PDF STRANGER IN THE VILLAGE

    The landscape is absolutely forbidding, mountains towering on all four sides, ice and snow as far as the eye can reach. In this white wilderness, men and women and children move all day, carrying washing, wood, buckets of milk or water, sometimes skiing on Sunday afternoons. All week long boys and young men are to be seen shoveling snow off the ...

  2. Stranger in the Village

    Stranger in the Village. " Stranger in the Village " is an essay by African-American novelist James Baldwin about his experiences in Leukerbad, Switzerland, after he nearly suffered a breakdown. The essay was originally published in Harper's Magazine, October 1953, [1] and later in his 1955 collection, Notes of a Native Son .

  3. 'Stranger in the Village': Essay

    In James Baldwin's thought-provoking essay, "Stranger in the Village," he delves into the profound experience of being an outsider in an unfamiliar environment. Baldwin recounts his time spent in a remote Swiss village, where he grapples with the complexities of race, identity, and the human condition. Through his introspective reflections and ...

  4. Notes of a Native Son: Stranger in the Village

    The villagers donate money to the church in order to "buy" Africans and convert them to Christianity. During the Lent carnival, two children are ritually painted in blackface and solicit these donations. The wife of a bistro owner happily tells Baldwin that last year the village bought 6-8 Africans. Baldwin thinks about European missionaries who are the first white people to arrive in ...

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  6. (PDF) James Baldwin's Stranger in the Village: An Essay in Black and

    Key words: James Baldwin, Stranger in the Village, African-American, black, white, dialectic James Baldwin seminal essay "Stranger in the Village" is one of the earliest and most discussed pieces that the African-American author wrote in and of Europe.

  7. Notes of a Native Son Stranger in the Village Summary and Analysis

    Summary. This essay begins by describing a small village (Leukerbad) in Switzerland where Baldwin stayed in the early 1950s. Before visiting this village, he had not realized that there were places in the world where no one had ever seen a black person. The village is small and located in the mountains, but it is not so inaccessible.

  8. (PDF) "James Baldwin's Stranger in the Village: An Essay in Black and

    Julie Anne Phillips. This article is a response to Young's (2016) essay on high white death rates in Kansas. I argue that a focus on external causes would further help researchers theorize about ...

  9. Stranger in the Village: James Baldwin's Prophetic Insight into Race

    Baldwin proceeds to read from his work, beginning with the ending of an essay he had written more than three decades earlier, during his short stay in the small Swiss village of Leukerbad at the outset of his life in Europe, titled "Stranger in the Village" and later published in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction (public library).

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    Stranger in the Village. Adjust. Share. by James Baldwin, This article is only available as a PDF to subscribers. ... Download PDF. Tags. 20th century African Americans Race relations Racism Switzerland United States. More from James Baldwin The projects of poverty Wraparound ... [Photo Essay] Theater of War. by Sabiha Çimen, [Essay]

  11. PDF "Stranger in the Village" from Notes of a Native Son

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    James Baldwin, "Stranger in the Village" (1955) June 3, 2020 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall. James Baldwin, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1955. "For this village, even were it incomparably more remote and incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted. These people cannot be, from the ...

  13. A Stranger in the Village: Anti-blackness in the Field

    In 1951, James Baldwin visited the remote town of Leukerbad, Switzerland, which inspired his essay Stranger in the Village.Baldwin's reflection of himself as a "first" encounter with Black flesh offers a critical reflection on overlooked discussions of the fatigue that accompanies Black researchers conducting fieldwork in (post)socialist spaces.

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    Stranger In The Village Summary "When, beneath the black mask, a human being begins to make himself felt one cannot escape a certain awful wonder as to what kind of human being it is." (4). In his essay, "Stranger in the Village", James Baldwin writes about the major differences that African Americans experience in Europe and America ...

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    The essay is an account of Baldwin's experiences in Leukerbad, Switzerland. Leukerbad's residents were fascinated by Baldwin's blackness, according to Baldwi...

  17. Strangers in the Village: James Baldwin, Teju Cole, and Glenn Ligon

    Monika Gehlawat, Strangers in the Village, James Baldwin Review, Vol. 5 (2019), pp. 48-72

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    The Essence Of Dubois Ideas In Baldwin's Stranger In The Village. James Baldwin captures the essence of the black-white existence in his article Stranger in the Village: "The black man insists, by whatever means he finds at his disposal, that the white man cease to regard him as an exotic rarity and recognize him as a... Stranger In The Village.

  19. "Stranger in the Village" & Editor's Introduction

    This introduction and essay have been drawn from the December issue of The American Reader. In "Stranger in the Village," James Baldwin quotes the insight of an anonymous observer of American race relations: "the Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men.". On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Baldwin's passing ...

  20. James Baldwin's Essay 'Stranger In The Village'

    658 Words3 Pages. "Dealing with an Unstoppable Change". The essay "Stranger in the Village" by James Baldwin highlights how a group of individuals that are cut off from the world can be so ignorant. James describes himself going to a strange village in Switzerland and nobody in the village have never seen a person of color before.

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  22. PDF JAMES BALDWIN'S STRANGER IN THE VILLAGE: AN ESSAY IN ...

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  23. Isolation In James Baldwin's Stranger In The Village

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  24. Racism Exposed In Stranger In The Village By James Baldwin

    In "Stranger in the Village" by James Baldwin, Baldwin uses the word "stranger" multiple times in the essays to empasize the isolation and he feels in the small Swiss town as the first black man there. As the story goes on he becomes less of a stranger and the people wonder less and less about him in the town.

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