Baldwin, univesalism, racism, redemption, humanity, affective economy, affective exchange, black man's experience, Thoreau, Emerson, Frederick Douglass
In the eponymous section of his most celebrated collection of essays, "Notes of a Native Son", James Baldwin, one of the most prominent African-American writers of the last century, explores questions of race through a very personal lens: he recounts his relationship with his father and his experience as an adult away from his family, reflections precipitated by the birth of his youngest sister, which coincided with his father's death. In this respect, Baldwin inscribes himself in the tradition of the American essay, which can be traced back at least to Thoreau and Emerson. It consists in provoking emotions in the reader through personal stories that take on a universal value, rather than in considering ideas abstractedly.
[...] But that is what Baldwin keeps bending towards, and he finally reconciles his dissonant visions by focusing on the affective economy he identifies all around him. It is evident from the very beginning of the text, as Baldwin's father is defined by his "bitterness", which Baldwin worries he passed on to him like a fatal flaw. When he is confronted with the reality of segregation in New Jersey, he compares the "rage" he feels to a disease that "can wreck more important things than race relations". [...]
[...] From that point, he is minorized, marginalized, silenced, dehumanized: he cannot believe in that vision. The personal might not be universal anymore, but that allows it to be political, i.e. rooted in interpersonal relationships and structural power dynamics rather that in transcendental absolutes. Rather than thinking in Biblical metaphors, as an adult, Baldwin blurs the limits of scale. Nowhere is it better expressed than in the lead-up to the riot. Baldwin rushes home "in great haste", because both his father's death and his sister's birth are imminent. [...]
[...] As "the scales fall from his eyes", to use a Biblical phrase, Baldwin retrieves memories of his childish perceptions: New Orleans is "Sodom and Gomorrah", his father "lived like a prophet". In childhood, his conception of the world was Biblical. That is because his father was extremely pious, of course, but it says something deeper about Baldwin's transition to adulthood, which coincided with his moving from an all-black community to New Jersey, where white and black people live together - or rather, segregated. [...]
[...] Affects are all-powerful; they rule mankind. That can be positive, too. The people of Harlem are all brought together, including types of people who usually do not get along at all, because of the "directionless, hopeless bitterness, as well as that panic which can scarcely be suppressed when one knows that a human being one loves is beyond one's reach, and in danger". That economy of affects culminates at the funeral. That is when Baldwin identifies the affect at the heart of the economy: pain, which can be summed up by the adage, "hurt people hurt people". [...]
[...] That is how Baldwin reconciles with the transcendental, and thus, with the universal. Pain and Redemption The final example of this cosmology is the redemption narrative that the priest invents wholesale for Baldwin's father, completely unsupported by facts; it is also the "invention" around a real incident, that posits that a black man was shot in the back by a policeman, while defending a black woman. As Baldwin puts it: "they preferred the invention because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly". [...]
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