Re-Viewing James Baldwin: Things not seen. - book review

African American Review, Winter, 2001 by Gary Storhoff

D. Quentin Miller, ed. Re-Viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2000. 256 pp. $69.50 cloth/$22.95 paper.

Seldom does one find an anthology of essays on a major author thoroughly enlightening and consistently provocative, yet this is precisely what D. Quentin Miller, editor of Re-Viewing James Baldwin, has accomplished. Miller's text challenges what seems to be a consensus: that at the end of his career Baldwin, bitter with his lack of recognition and the seeming failure of his political agenda, loses artistic control, producing works that do not live up to his earlier promise. In his "Introduction," Miller explains that Baldwin was caught in the classic double bind, for his readers demanded political polemics in his work, then simultaneously decried his perceived excessive rhetoric and politicized rage. Thus, Baldwin's "decline" was seen as inevitable. To reverse this judgment, Miller has assembled ten essays that will certainly stimulate a much-needed reassessment of Baldwin's neglected work.

Several of these essays are stunning in their originality. Cassandra M. Ellis, for example, argues in "The Black Boy Looks at the Silver Screen: Baldwin as Moviegoer," that Baldwin anticipates but also complicates contemporary film theory in his The Devil Finds Work, Baldwin's meditation on American film. Baldwin's treatment of movie-going for African Americans, Ellis writes, resists the sometimes facile classifications occasionally found in spectatorship theory, for what fascinates Baldwin is a complex collision of gender and race submerged on the screen, and its effect on an African American audience. Joshua L. Miller discusses Baldwin's collaboration with photographer Richard Avedon in " 'A Striking Addiction to Irreality': Nothing Personal and the Legacy of the Photo-Text Genre." Presenting an informative history of the genre's development--and of African American revisions of it--Joshua Miller illuminates how Baldwin's text and Avedon's photos upset the "documentary relation between photo and word." Thes e two exciting essays alone are worth the price of the ticket.

By casting light on neglected work, the essays often clarify Baldwin's more famous books. Michael F. Lynch's carefully argued "Staying Out of the Temple: Baldwin, the African American Church, and The Amen Corner" extends his previously published studies on Baldwin. For Lynch, Christian faith is the figure in Baldwin's carpet, and Baldwin becomes, as a consequence of his "dialectical cast of mind," a "virtual secular minister" to his audience. Lynch's essay both supplements our understanding of Go Tell It On the Mountain and increases our admiration of Baldwin's dramaturgy. Baldwin's use of music is thoughtfully discussed by Saadi A. Simawe in "What Is in a Sound?: The Metaphysics and Politics in The Amen Corner." Saadi situates Baldwin's concept of music, which appears throughout his career, within the broader context of philosophy and ideology. Warren J. Carson also discusses Baldwin's use of music--specifically, his use of gospel songs--in his "Manhood, Musicality, and Male Bonding in Just Above My Head." K athleen N. Drowne provides a fresh look at Giovanni's Room by showing how Baldwin uses space as an objective correlative. Her chapter" 'An Irrevocable Condition': Constructions of Home and the Writing of Place in Giovanni's Room" argues that Baldwin's manipulation of space exposes the psychological and moral struggles of his characters.

Lynch, Simawe, Carson, and Drowne apparently agree that past preoccupation with Baldwin's social and political positions has deflected critics from exploring more subtle, complex, and paradoxical issues, such as the spiritual nature of identity and personality, and the artistic means Baldwin employs to dramatize these issues. But this assertion is by no means the consensus in this volume, and other authors claim that Baldwin's political orientation needs renewed exploration using postmodernist theory. Susan Feldman, utilizing the insights of the Frankfurt School, insists that all things are political, especially sexuality, in "Another Look at Another Country: Reconciling Baldwin's Racial and Sexual Politics." Charles P. Toombs's forceful essay "Black-Gay-Man Chaos in Another Country" attributes Baldwin's troubling treatment of women in that novel to a white patriarchy that "destroys black-gay-man life, productivity, and genius." Toombs makes a passionate argument on behalf of Baldwin's effort to dramatize the internal and external pressures a gay African American must necessarily face. Deploying a chart and a full panoply of recent critical theory, Yasmin Y. DeGout shows that Baldwin anticipates in his short stories many ideas from feminist, gay, and gender studies. Her study of Going to Meet the Man in" 'Masculinity' and (lm)maturity: 'The Man Child' and Other Stories in Baldwin's Gender Studies Enterprise" arrives at the not-so-startling conclusion that central characters are indoctrinated "into limiting racial or sex-gender constructs."