Composite Calendar
James Baldwin's Notion of the “Negro”
With IAS Residential Fellow, Professor Grant Farred, Cornell University
In his essays, especially in the collections "Nobody Knows My Name" and "Notes of a Native Son," James Baldwin -- in strategic moments -- offers a provocation: the only true American is not those who trace their heritage to the early colonists, but the Negro. The Negro, descended of slaves, subjected to Jim Crow laws under Reconstruction and well beyond, denied equality, is the only American subject who properly incarnates what it means to be an American. Through this term, Baldwin proposes an entirely novel way to conceive of the American experience -- one that begins in subjugation.
please contact Pierre-Philippe Fraiture at: P-P.Fraiture@warwick .ac.uk for more information.