This article explores the various ways James Baldwin is portrayed in modern media, focusing on the tendency to present him as a monolithic figure of wisdom and social commentary while neglecting aspects of his identity, particularly his queerness.
Your feelings of orphanage, say. The modern picture of Baldwin is dominated by the retrospective veneration slant. He has become a cross between the preacher and the Daddy, composing a portrait of the segregated world through his seer’s gift for ice clarity—a depiction that comes at the expense of other aspects of his character.
I have a hard time with, for example, “I Am Not Your Negro”—the 2016 Raoul Peck documentary, constructed from archival images and film—which I know to be an excellent exhumation of late-in-life Baldwin wrestling with his unfinished manuscript, “Remember This House,” a memoirist work spun out from his grief following the killings of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. What I bristle at is the film’s excision of Baldwin’s queerness, which means the excision of full love. Baldwin is the de-facto writer of the film; his writings supply the narration. But the voice reading them is that of Samuel L. Jackson, phenomenal and eclipsing—and straight. It manages to cancel out the strong aural memory we have of Baldwin the orator, to functionally unqueer him. What is left is the voice of the disambiguated prophet. Baldwin becomes the immortal speaker, always at service. He sermonizes over the terror of his world and of ours, as the archival gives way to contemporary images of Black Lives Matter rallies. Other treatments attempt biography through the display of letters. The centennial of Baldwin’s birth, this past year, saw no shortage of hymns, modulating the key to minor and rendering the arrangements slightly discordant. The New York Public Library took the route of institutional projection. Culled from an acquisition of some of Baldwin’s personal archive, two exhibits—one at the library’s landmark building, on Fifth Avenue, and the other at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, on Malcolm X Boulevard—emphasize how Baldwin fell in love with reading and thinking in the city’s libraries
JAMES BALDWIN QUEERNESS BIOGRAPHY ARCHIVE SOCIAL COMMENTARY
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