Baldwin’s Postcolonial Turn
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article explores the radical turn in James Baldwin’s writing of the late 1960s/early 1970s with a particular emphasis on the long essay, No Name in the Street (1972). The article proposes reading Baldwin’s essays of this period postcolonially as a critical key to unpick some of the broad cultural assumptions deployed in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s infamous report of 1965. Proposing the Moynihan Report as a significant periodizing milestone, the article will argue that Baldwin’s radical turn stands as a form of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak refers to as “strategic essentialism,” a form of “essentialist critique” which can become a powerful postcolonial weapon directed toward the “interrogation of … essentialist terms.” Reading the Moynihan Report and No Name in the Street comparatively, the article aims to illuminate a postcolonial aspect to the counterdiscourse provided by Baldwin’s increasingly radical, militant, and nationalistic polemics of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Source: James Baldwin Review
DOI: 10.7227/jbr.11.8
Author: Gerald David Naughton
Institution: University of Sharjah
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7082634366
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