James Baldwin

Undergraduate / Graduate

In our contemporary moment of rising inequality, James Baldwin has gained much purchase as a kind of prophet. But in his own time, Baldwin consistently called himself a witness, holding to his belief that an "artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian" who must "make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are." All in all, his artistic mission was to express "what it is like to be alive." Reading across both his fiction and nonfiction, we will consider Baldwin's concept of the artist, exploring the affective life of inequality through what we might call his moral imagination. (Fiction, 20th/21st)