Baldwin After BLM
Description
If James Baldwin maintained a “ubiquity in the imagination of Black Lives Matter,” as William J. Maxwell and others have observed, then what are we to make of his words and image in a moment that Cedric Johnson and others have argued must be understood as “After Black Lives Matter”?
The failure or defeat of this particular form of politics has led to calls for its critical examination, suggesting the need for a similar critical reflection on the aesthetics that were attendant on this movement. Queries that we may usefully explore together include:
- Was the turn to Baldwin part of an attempt to reimagine forgotten conflicts, or simply a form of revivalism overburdened by nostalgia?
- Did the movement betray its proverbial father, or was its faith in such a de-contextualized avatar ultimately misplaced?
- Do we perhaps need to break free of (some version of) Baldwin in addition to breaking free of those politics that keep us bound to society’s exploitations?
- How might we best contextualize this recent, continuing history and its political and aesthetic forms?
- What unexplored methods of comparison might be most useful to this problem and its moment?
- What kind of relationship to the literature and struggle, the art and politics of the past is necessary for those of the present?
We welcome a variety of critical approaches to this nexus of problems. Baldwin and his work should play a significant role in, but need not be central to, the argument presented.
Please submit abstracts of 250 words or less. All contributions will be considered for publication in James Baldwin Review.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
William J. Maxwell is the Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (Princeton University Press, 2015), which won an American Book Award, and New Negro, Old Left: African American Writing and Communism between the Wars (Columbia University Press, 1999). He is the editor of James Baldwin: The FBI File (Arcade, 2017); of Claude McKay’s Complete Poems (University of Illinois Press, 2004); and the co-editor of McKay’s previously unpublished novel Romance in Marseille (Penguin Classics, 2020). His book-in-progress, James Baldwinism: The Baldwin Revival and 21st-Century Memory, traces how Baldwin became the 20th-century African American writer most cherished in the 21st.
Speaker Bio
Konstantina Karageorgos is a scholar based at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is the Director of Faculty and Curriculum in the Comprehensive Studies Program, an academic unit forged out of three decades of direct action led by the Black Action Movement. Her work has been published in African American Review, Mediations, the edited volumes Cambridge History of the U.S. South and Lineages of the Literary Left, and magazines including Against the Current and Jacobin.
Speaker Bio
Remo Verdickt is a postdoctoral researcher at University of Leuven, Belgium. His current project focuses on the postwar relationship between the US Supreme Court and Western literature, while his PhD thesis studied James Baldwin's posthumous career. Verdickt has published in several international journals and collected volumes, including Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Parallax, James Baldwin Review, Post45, and The Routledge Companion to James Baldwin (forthcoming).
Speaker Bio
Rohan Ghatage is an Assistant Professor at the University of New Brunswick. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, James Baldwin Review, and University of Toronto Quarterly.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Frank Leon Roberts is Assistant Professor of English and Black Studies at Amherst College. He is the co-founder of the National Black Justice Coalition, the largest and oldest Black LGBT civil rights organization in the country. In 2014, he became the first professor in the country to teach a college course on the Black Lives Matter movement. Dr. Roberts is currently at work on a monograph on Baldwin's theatrical legacy, tentatively entitled Fugitive Stagecraft: James Baldwin's Critical Stages.
Speaker Bio
John Livesey (he/him) is a doctoral student at University College London, completing a thesis
exploring James Baldwin’s relationship to visual culture. He completed his BA at the University of
Oxford, graduating in 2019, followed by an MA at UCL on their Contemporary Literature and
Critical Theory course. For his current research, John is the recipient of a scholarship from AHRC,
the UK’s research council.
Speaker Bio
Kyle Proehl holds a PhD in comparative literature with an emphasis in critical theory from the University of California, Davis. His research is concerned with social crisis and its literary and visual representation. He has written for Critical Inquiry, Radical Philosophy, the Marx and Philosophy Review of Books, and elsewhere. He is currently an editorial assistant for the James Baldwin Review at Washington University in St. Louis.