This study examines the politics of identification in antiracist struggles and asks how people begin and sustain social movement work across lines of difference. The project follows a series of activists and public intellectuals to sites of conflict in order to explore how actors confront failures in solidarity by summoning people to understand their freedom as bound to antiracist struggles. In work by James Baldwin from the 1960s and work by three contemporary social movement organizations—Black Lives Matter, antiracist LGBTQ organization Southerners on New Ground (SONG), and immigrant justice organization #Not1More—actors construct shared forms of identification across racial lines using kinship language and references to the body. Undergirding these rhetorical and organizing strategies is a concept—boundness—with a history in black political thought; a paradigm in which people’s lives are understood to be co-constituted and their freedom bound together. The first chapter traces the concept of boundness in James Baldwin’s political thought and explores how boundness offers an alternative and embodied way to theorize racial identity, racialized violence, and interracial solidarity. Chapter II examines interviews with James Baldwin in 1963 and #BlackLivesMatter activists in 2014-2015 to explore how their overlapping interventions reorient public discussions about racial violence. Chapters III and IV examine how contemporary activists in SONG and #Not1More generate shared forms of identification across racial lines. Drawing on archival research and ethnography, this study employs a close reading approach to specific moments in political discourse and organizing to theorize how people on the ground are crafting and contesting forms of identification. Ultimately, this project offers an account of the ways in which forms of political identification are structured by ethical and emotional orientations, and contends that contestations over these structures are a primary site of politics. This dissertation includes previously published material (Chapter I). / 10000-01-01

abstract: James Baldwin (1924-1987) was one of the most well-known African American fiction and nonfiction writers of the twentieth century. Throughout his life and career, he earned a worldwide reputation as a respected novelist, memoirist, and essayist who contributed to a wide array of artistic movements and intellectual discourses. Many scholars have noted the particular African American religious and cultural influences upon Baldwin’s work. More recently, scholars have additionally noted the importance of Baldwin’s globally-engaged thought and internationalist life. Throughout all of his work, Baldwin wrote extensively on the subject of religion. This dissertation posits the topics of religion, violence, and marginalization as integral to his nonfiction writings and speeches, particularly after 1967. As such, it argues that Baldwin in his early career established four distinct discourses on morality, evil, scapegoatism, and purity that he came to connect in his later writings on the intersection of religion, violence, and marginalization. Within these writings, Baldwin also displayed a rigorous engagement with multicultural and multireligious artistic and literary canons, along with the evolving academic study of religion. Therefore, not only should the intersection of religion, violence, and marginalization be a central consideration for Baldwin scholarship, but scholars of religion and violence in particular would benefit from engaging Baldwin’s addressment of this intersection. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Religious Studies 2019

James Baldwin, a Black American writer, contends that the root cause of America’s racial problem is not necessarily prejudice or hatred but guilt. In his essay, “White Man’s Guilt,” Baldwin says that most of the arguments white people use today against the reality of America’s racial problem can be reduced to a plea: “Do not blame me. I was not there. I did not do it” (Price 411). In many of his essays, Baldwin explores white America’s long history of guilt, denial, and justification, and he explains that many white Christians—in an attempt to avoid blame and protect their power, their privilege, and their identity as good, innocent, moral people—have perpetrated immense trauma against Black people. Since the time of slavery, white Christians have created a variety of theological justifications for racial inequality, and these justifications generally shift blame to Black people and to God. “Now, this is not called morality,” proclaims Baldwin, “this is not called faith, this has nothing to do with Christ. It has to do with power, and part of the dilemma of the Christian Church is the fact that it opted…for power and betrayed its own first principles” (Price 438). Contemporary research in the field of race and religion has shown that racism—and the denial of it—is often worse in white Christian communities today. A close examination of how and why white Christians have participated in racism demonstrates that racism is more than a few isolated incidents of “bad” people engaging in individual acts of prejudice, hatred, or violence. In this thesis, I will put Baldwin’s observations and insights about white people and white Christians in conversation with other scholars of white Christian ideology to demonstrate that racism is a widespread moral sin rooted in guilt and the attempt to avoid blame, maintain power, and protect identity. I will argue that preaching love, forgiveness, and unity often misses the mark, and that Baldwin’s solution of repentance offers a more effective approach in helping white Christians to combat racism today.

This study investigates how James Baldwin thought about history and treats his first novel as an important document in extricating his construct of the past. A close reading of the work reveals that it is an examination rather than a symptom of two powerful forces that dominate Baldwin's psychology, his father and his history. James Baldwin felt the individual interpretation of one's experience is just as important as the experience itself. The novel is an informative exposition of how people interpret their experience and how that interpretation affects their psychology. Through Go Tell It on the Mountain Baldwin recreates the personal history he knows little about and is afforded a psychological freedom he would have never known without its completion. This study illuminates how useful fiction is to one's historical conscience and perception. The research exposes how important a sense of history is to the formation of identity.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis examines the politics of black identity in African American literature during what has come to be known as the ‘age of three worlds’. Across four chapters, I analyse texts by Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry, exploring the way in which their writing plays out within and against the geopolitical exigencies of the Cold War and contemporaneous discourses of Civil Rights and black (inter)nationalism. In doing so, I explore the contrasting ways in which each of them displaces the binary logic that is typically seen as defining the 1950s, as a means of reconstituting both American and African American identity. Rejecting either/or identities, they all decentre prevailing notions of national and cultural identity by juxtaposing them with alternative spaces and temporalities, the result of which is a dual perspective that is simultaneously local and transnational. By extricating themselves, whether physically or intellectually, from a monolithic discursive framework, Ellison, Wright, Baldwin, and Hansberry recast the idea of double consciousness famously articulated by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Instead of being a self-negating non-identity that serves as the psychological corollary to African Americans’ marginalised status, ‘two-ness’ is transmuted into a privileged vantage point that allows them to both intervene on the world historical stage as empowered modern subjects and renegotiate their relationship with the United States. What this two-ness amounts to, I argue, is a kind of dissonance. ‘Dissonance’, Duke Ellington claimed in 1941, names black people’s ‘way of life in America. We are something apart, yet an integral part’. The principle of introducing a ‘wrong’ note into a piece of music in order to generate new modalities of expression found in jazz is transposed into a social and literary context by the writers examined in this thesis. Each of them embodies and mobilises the socially grounded sense of being apart and a part alluded to by Ellington as a means of defamilarising normative notions of race, gender, and sexuality as they pertain to American-ness. In their place, they posit alternative forms of knowledge and politicised identity that reconstitute what it means to be both black and American in the middle of the twentieth century.

Ce mémoire examine la question de la formation de l'identité en tant que procédure compliquée dans laquelle plusieurs éléments interviennent. L'identité d'une personne se compose à la fois d’une identité propre et d’une autre collective. Dans le cas où l’identité propre est jugée sévèrement par les autres comme étant déviante, cela poussera la personne à, ou bien maintenir une image compatible avec les prototypes sociaux ou bien résister et affirmer son identité personnelle. Mon travail montre que l'exclusion et la répression de certains aspects de l'identité peuvent causer un disfonctionnement psychique difficile à surmonter. Par contre, l'acceptation de soi et l’adoption de tous les éléments qui la constituent conduisent, certes après une longue lutte, au salut de l’âme et du corps. Le premier chapitre propose une approche psychosociale qui vise à expliquer le fonctionnement des groupes et comment l'interaction avec autrui joue un rôle décisif dans la formation de l'identité. Des éléments extérieurs comme par exemple les idéaux sociaux influencent les comportements et les choix des gens. Toutefois, cette influence peut devenir une menace aux spécificités personnelles et aux traits spécifiques. Le deuxième chapitre examine la question des problèmes qu’on risque d’avoir au cas où les traits identitaires franchiraient les normes sociales. Nous partons du problème épineux de la quête de soi dans Giovanni's Room de James Baldwin. L'homosexualité de David était tellement refusée par la société qu’elle a engendrée chez lui des sentiments de honte et de culpabilité. Il devait choisir entre le sacrifice des aspects de soi pour satisfaire les paradigmes sociaux ou bien perdre ce qu’il a de propre. David n'arrive pas à se libérer. Il reste prisonnier des perceptions rigides au sujet de la masculinité et de la sexualité. Mon analyse se focalise essentiellement sur l'examen des différents éléments théoriques qui touchent la question du sexe et de la sexualité. Le résultat est le suivant : plus les opinions dominantes sont rigides et fermes, plus elles deviennent une prison pour l’individu. Par contre, plus elles sont tolérantes et flexibles, plus elles acceptent les diversités de l'identité humaine. Dans le dernier chapitre, j'examine la question de la représentation des relations entre les caractères masculins dans Just Above My Head. L'homosexualité est présentée comme un moyen sacré pour exprimer l'amour. Les caractères révèlent leurs sentiments implicitement à travers les chants spirituel tel que le gospel ou bien explicitement à travers la connexion physique. Dans ce roman, Baldwin montre que c'est seulement grâce à la sincérité et à l'amour que l'individu peut atteindre la libération du soi. / The present thesis examines the construction of identity as a complex process in which many factors interact. A person's identity comprises both the personal self and the collective self. Having an aspect of identity that is judged as deviant or devalued will lead to the individual's confusion between maintaining an image that fits social prototypes or embracing his personal identity. My work demonstrates that the exclusion or repression of certain aspects of identity may lead to disconnection from one's inner self. Yet, it is only through self-acceptance and the embracing of all elements of the self that one manages to resist hostility and gain the liberation of the soul and body. In the first chapter, a social psychological approach is employed in order to explain group functioning and the role that group interaction plays in shaping one's identity. External factors like social ideals influence people's behaviors and choices. Therefore, they represent a threat to personal differences and unique traits. The second chapter examines the implications of having an identity that transgresses social norms by exploring David's quest for the self in James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. David's insecure identity because of his homosexuality fills him with destructive feelings of shame and guilt. I maintain that sacrificing aspects of the self to satisfy social paradigms may cause the loss of the individual's integrated self. David fails in freeing the self which remains imprisoned in fixed internalized perceptions of manhood and male sexuality. I analyse theoretical views about sex and gender that vary from rigid and traditional opinions to more tolerant and universalizing ones that accept possibilities of diversity in human identity. iv In the last chapter, I will examine Baldwin's depiction of male's bonding in Just Above My Head. The characters confront their emotions. Homosexuality is portrayed as a sacred way of expressing love. The characters' feelings are revealed both in gospel singing and in bodily connection. In this novel, Baldwin demonstrates that it is only through sincerity, disclosure and love that one can attain the liberation of the self.

"Cold War Playboys: Models of Masculinity in the Literature of Playboy" emphasizes the literary voices that emerged in response to the Cold War's redefinitions of space and sexuality and, thus, adds to the growing national discourse of Cold War literary and masculinity studies. I argue that the literature Playboy includes has always been a necessary feature to creating its masculinity model; however, that very literature often destabilizes the magazine's grand narrative because it presents readers with alternative models of masculinity. To make that argument, I presume five things: 1) masculinity, like femininity, is a construct; 2) the mid-century masculinity crisis should be attributed to redefinitions of space and sexuality; 3) the crisis generated a variety of masculinity models; 4) Playboy presents its own, unified model of masculinity through its editorial features; and 5) finally, that Playboy should be considered an early Cold War artifact because the space Playboy magazine represents, dually domestic and privatized, is hardly trivial--decade after decade, it has absorbed society's shifts and reflected them back to readers. Citing biographical, historical, critical, and textual evidence, I consider how the literature of Playboy magazine responds to the construction of Cold War discourses regarding sexuality and space. In particular, I examine how Playboy contributions from Jack Kerouac, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Baldwin detail models of masculinity informed by Cold War culture. Playboy's emphasis was obviously Playmates, but fiction always appeared in its pages. As its largest component, fiction became the backbone of Playboy. Therefore, Hefner's educated, sexual male identity included, and still includes, reading a wide array of literature--from Ian Fleming to Ursula le Guin. "Cold War Playboys" asks: How did literature gain primacy in Hefner's ideal male identity? What purposes does reading this literature serve when appealing to a particular masculinity? Answering these questions allows me to explore how one mass-produced magazine and specific literary figures participated in and resisted the construction of Cold War discourses regarding space and sexuality.