Postcategorical Utopia

CHAPTER 1
Introduction: James Baldwin and the Utopian Impulse

James Baldwin was a witness. A seer with insight deep into the oppressive structures and practices of American society and beyond. He was also a dreamer. Not in the sense of passive and stale daydreaming, but, rather, in the sense of politically and socially polemical envisioning of our possibilities to imagine and construct alternative futures, decidedly distinct from the oppressive modes of social being which Baldwin so persistently criticized and which continue to define our lives in the twenty-first century. This is a thematic undercurrent that runs through Baldwin’s work in all the forms and genres that he embraced in his career. And this is exactly where and why we find ourselves in need of new ways of reading his works, ways of accessing the depths of his time-defying vision of what he often referred to as the New Jerusalem. In other words, Baldwin’s writing is characterized by a progressive, emancipatory impulse towards a world where the categorizations based on race, sexuality, gender and class would be divested of their capacity for oppression, for producing and maintaining relations of subjugation and abuse.

It is here that the concept of utopia assumes the spotlight of critical attention. Despite the fact that all too many people, both inside and outside the academia, still flinch at the mere mention of the word ‘utopia’ – or very likely exactly because of that – this complex and controversial concept requires to be placed under scrutiny, to be explicated, disassembled and reconstructed. This study takes its inspiration from Fredric Jameson’s proclamation, according to which ‘the question of Utopia would seem to be a crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change’.¹ Unless we want to uphold the oppressive social structures and institutions that define our lives and the lives of generations to come, it is our obligation and prerogative to rethink utopia in order to keep up our capability of social dreaming and envisioning cultural change. In the previous couple of decades or so, a remarkable body of research has emerged in which this demanding task has been undertaken by several scholars. While most of these studies tend to focus on science fiction, they are undoubtedly crucial for my account on the utopian impulse in Baldwin, as they rethink and reconceptualise the concept of utopia in innovative and groundbreaking ways, particularly in terms of the categories of race and sexuality. These issues provide an important gateway into the depths of Baldwin’s literary and intellectual work.

In this book, I want to highlight and, indeed, bear witness to the incessant urgency of James Baldwin’s literary and intellectual legacy. The three and a half decades that have passed since the end of his life and literary career provide a critical vantage point and the gift of hindsight, which facilitate a reassessment of his work. Although the larger social and political influence of his prophetic and polemical voice arguably decreased in the later stages of his career, its echoes have started to resonate with increasing strength in recent decades. This rising wave of interest in his work and legacy is long overdue because – despite his prominent role as perhaps the most frequently quoted African American writer and social activist in the late 1950s and early 1960s, particularly concerning the issues of race in America – his work from the mid-1960s onwards has all too often been ignored and underrated. The recent resurgence of critical and popular attention paid to Baldwin is evidenced by the publication during the past couple of decades or so of several anthologies and major studies of his work and by the recurrent reprinting of his books. The founding of the journal James Baldwin Review in 2014 and the organization of several conferences on his work and legacy, for example in London, Boston, New York, Montpellier and Paris between 2007 and 2016, with impressive rosters of speakers and delegates from around the world, are further indications of the longevity of Baldwin’s literary and intellectual legacy. The success of the documentary film I Am Not Your Negro (2016), directed by Raoul Peck – which was nominated for and won several notable international awards – and the Academy Award winning movie If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), directed by Barry Jenkins, speak, for their part, for the turning of the tide in the history of Baldwin’s public status.²

The bottom line and fundamental reason for the tidal wave of renewed interest are, however, that Baldwin’s words are still invested with urgency, undiminished in their insight and importance, demanding that we hear, recover and reconsider what has been ignored and lost. His lifelong mission to fight against the oppressive power of social categorization in its various forms must not be forgotten. It is this call to remember and to re-evaluate the literary and ideological legacy of James Baldwin that this study seeks to respond to and participate in.

Broadly speaking, Baldwin’s humanist agenda is based on his conviction that human beings are capable of moral progress and positive change. Accordingly, a central tendency in his writing is the desire to undermine and transcend various kinds of categorizations, especially those pertaining to race and sexuality. The origins of this impulse are expressed in an autobiographical passage in his essay ‘Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood’: ‘all of the American categories of male and female, straight or not, black or white, were shattered, thank heaven, very early in my life. Not without anguish, certainly; but once you have discerned the meaning of a label, it may seem to define you for others, but it does not have the power to define you to yourself.’³ Baldwin understood the capacity of these categories to produce and maintain relations of oppression, and he devoted his life and work to resisting and dismantling their power.

Another example of Baldwin’s incredulity at categorization can be found in his seminal essay ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’, in which he criticizes Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940)⁴ and explains why he sees it as a failure:

we find ourselves bound, first without, then within, by the nature of our categorisation. […] We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed. […] The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorisation alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.⁵

As Lawrie Balfour points out in The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy (2001), Baldwin saw the moral vision perpetuated by Native Son and much of the tradition of protest literature as based on a simplifying division of the world into ‘good and evil, innocent and guilty.’⁶ She argues that

[i]‌nadequate to the task of grappling with either slavery or racial injustices, this moral vision copes with their existence by assigning individuals and their behavior to simple categories and mouthing moral formulas. The protest novel proclaims its good intentions but does so by providing so flat a picture of the evil it aims to overcome that readers are not required to recognize racial injustice in their own lives.⁷

This is exactly what Baldwin sought to avoid and criticize in his own work. He saw that categorizations tend to become instruments of power through which relations of inequality and oppression are produced and maintained. This is where Baldwin’s thinking assumes a position of resistance against the tradition of Western modernity which may be seen as largely based on such categories as gender, race, sexuality and class. Baldwin was far ahead of his time in his questioning and challenging the essentialist conceptions of identity that these categories entail.

Looking at Baldwin through the utopian lens may not seem an obvious choice, since a majority of utopian literary studies has tended to concentrate on speculative fiction and science fiction, in particular. Granted, it would be highly problematic to read Baldwin’s works as science fiction by any stretch of the imagination, as his writing neither depicts any clear-cut models or instances of a better world nor includes any elements that could be regarded as supernatural. Instead, what may be detected in his fiction, in particular, is the utopian impulse. This may be understood, in accordance with Jameson’s thinking, through the distinction between utopia as a genre and utopia as an impulse.⁸ In other words, the primary focus of this study is placed not on what Phillip E. Wegner refers to as the ‘literary genre of the narrative utopia’⁹ per se, but, rather, on the utopian impulse in narratives. In Baldwin’s novels, the utopian impulse is manifested in different forms, such as utopian spaces, syncretic characters and chronotopes. It is important to emphasize that in terms of Ernst Bloch’s differentiation between abstract and concrete utopia, the utopian impulse in Baldwin’s novels largely operates according to the logic of the latter. In other words, the utopian impulse does not appear as mere politically docile daydreaming of some current problem being miraculously resolved in the future. Rather, it is rooted in the problems of the past and the present and constructs anticipatory glimpses of futures radically different from the present.¹⁰

Its focus on the utopian impulse in narratives that cannot in any straightforward sense be defined as utopian texts is what gives this book its central impetus and, to be sure, its fundamental challenge. As Angelika Bammer suggests in Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s (1991), the utopian impulse is prevalent in minority literatures even when they do not construct actual utopias.¹¹ Limiting utopian literary studies to science fiction would, therefore, leave an important dimension of utopia in literatures unexamined. It is exactly in looking for the traces of the utopian impulse, of what Bloch calls anticipatory illumination or consciousness,¹² in texts that would seem to fall outside the conventional category of utopian literature, that becomes one of the central contributions of this book to utopian studies. This is in line with what Bammer’s Partial Visions also focuses on, that is, not on full-fledged utopias, but, rather, on fragments and anticipatory signs of alternative futures.

My main focus in this book will be on explicating how the politics of race and sexuality and the concomitant categories of identity function in Baldwin’s writing. To conceptualize the grand scheme of Baldwin’s thinking, the central underlying thematic current which runs throughout the entirety of his oeuvre, this study foregrounds what I will call the idea of postcategorical utopia, an impulse towards a world in which such categories as race, sexuality and gender would lose their capacity for oppression. Such a world would inevitably be radically different from our own, since the principles and practices of late modernity are so fundamentally based on the power relations produced through social categorization. Baldwin never actually defines this ideal in any detail, except in negative terms, as the absence of categorization; rather, he suggests simply that the means of attaining this better world is love in the Baldwinian sense, that is, without ideological restrictions.¹³ The characters in his novels transgress and momentarily transcend various conventional categories, but this usually fails to produce any lasting state of personal happiness or any changes on a larger social scale. Despite the transgressive behaviour of these characters, the world around them remains unchanged, and we only see utopian glimpses of and allusions to what might lie beyond the world of late modernity governed by oppressive categorization, which may be read in accordance with Bloch’s anticipatory illumination. The transitory temporality of these utopian moments does not dilute the polemical power of Baldwin’s writing as a socially symbolic act in its own right, since its significance and effect on the world are undeniable. It is exactly the explication and analysis of Baldwin’s denunciation of the defining power of categorization that will prove to be at the core of my contribution to Baldwin studies.

My analysis of the politics of race and sexuality in Baldwin’s writing will concentrate on three of his novels: his debut, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), his fourth novel, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968) and his last one, Just Above My Head (1979).¹⁴ Together, these works span not only most of Baldwin’s career as a writer, but also three different phases both of American society and of the struggle of African Americans towards social equality. Each of these novels is necessarily shaped by its distinctive socio-political context, providing access to the crucial social issues and problems of each era. Go Tell was written during the late 1940s and early 1950s, an era of racial segregation, the slow economic ascension of the Black middle class, the exclusionary ideology of McCarthyism, Cold War and the almost dormant state of Black protest movements. Baldwin wrote Tell Me in the mid and late 1960s, marked by fervent civil rights activism, the passing of the Civil Rights Bill and the Voting Rights Act, political assassinations, the Vietnam War and the conflict within the Black protest movement between the ideologies of nonviolence and Black Power. Just Above was published eleven years later, in a period characterized by the widening of the chasm between the Black élite and the black proletariat, the backlash of White conservatism and the waning of affirmative action and Black radicalism. In addition to Baldwin’s novels, I will also refer to his essays from various periods to analyse the ideological and utopian aspects of his writing.

An integral theoretical and methodological starting point for my readings of Baldwin’s novels is Fredric Jameson’s theory of the political unconscious, according to which literary works are read as symbolic acts, producing imaginary resolutions to real social contradictions.¹⁵ In this process, the text is regarded as a site of ideology, and its central problems are read as symbolic manifestations of the social contradictions of the historical context of its production. According to my elaboration of Jameson’s theory, these problems appear in the text in the form of ideological closures, as products of exclusionary ways of thinking and structuring the world, which result in the creation and maintenance of oppressive social categories. The text seeks to solve these problems by generating what I regard as utopian projections, visions of an alternative, better future. My definitions of the concepts of ideology and utopia follow Karl Mannheim’s views, presented in Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (1929), according to which ideology is defined as a complex of ideas aimed at preserving the prevailing order, whereas utopia refers to modes of thinking that tend towards transforming the status quo.¹⁶ Building on Jameson’s thinking, the text is conceptualized as a field of force, where history appears in the form of ideological closures, countered by fantasy, which assumes the form of utopian projections. This fundamental dialectic of ideology and utopia gives rise to the text at the intersection of history and fantasy and, simultaneously, reshapes the levels of history and fantasy. As a consequence, the connection between a text and its socio-historical context is formed, and a political mode of reading literary texts is established.

The analyses of Baldwin’s novels follow the framework of the three horizons of Jameson’s theory of the political unconscious as outlined in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981).¹⁷ The process of reading proceeds through three distinct conceptual horizons in which the social ground of the reading expands gradually. In the first horizon, the fundamental contradiction of the text must be identified and then grasped as a symbolic resolution of a real social contradiction. The second horizon marks the widening out of the social scope of the reading to encompass the social order. Here the text is understood as a symbolic utterance, which carries an ideological message in the antagonistic dialogue between a dominant and an oppressed social group. The third horizon places the literary work in its widest context in the history of modes of production. This is conducted by searching for traces of how the text under scrutiny is related to modes of production and their cultural dominants.

In the analytical chapters of this book, each of the three of Baldwin’s novels will largely comply with one of these horizons, following the strategy adopted by Jameson in The Political Unconscious, which will enable me to provide new angles on these works. What this means in this study is that in Chapter 3 Go Tell will be read within the scope of the first horizon of Jameson’s hermeneutical theory, in which the oppressive and confining closure, the home of the Grimes family, will be regarded as the central cluster of problems. This is grasped as a symbolic manifestation of the fundamental social contradictions of the era in which the novel was produced, that is, the problem of racial subjugation in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s and, on the other hand, the issue of heteronormativity within Black religious communities. The analysis will explicate the functioning of the dialectic of ideology and utopia in terms of space, both ideological and utopian. Tell Me will be placed within the second horizon, in which the triangle of transgressive relationships produces the syncretic, mythical character of Black Christopher, who functions as an embodiment of the Baldwinian ideal of love as a means of transcending the categories of race and sexuality. In the third horizon, Just Above will be read as a manifestation of resistance against the oppressive ideologies of modernity, particularly in terms of race, but also against the forms of oppression which can be detected within the Black counterculture of modernity, especially homophobia and misogyny.

In other words, the reading process starts from the Black family and community, moves on to the level of the social order in terms of race and sexuality and finally expands to the level of the historical continuum of modes of production where the oppressive tendencies of both Western modernity and its Black counterculture are revealed as the fundamental loci of ideological closure. This strategy will explicate the politics of race and sexuality on three different levels by unmasking the gradual expansion of the political scope of Baldwin’s work and underscoring the political significance of the underlying impulse of postcategorical utopia which runs throughout his work. In the process, the hitherto ignored and understated importance of Tell Me and Just Above as integral parts of his work is reassessed and confirmed.

The rest of this introductory chapter seeks to provide some contextual information on Baldwin, his work, reception and earlier research. The chapter concludes with an overview of utopian thinking in the African American context, tracing the ways in which the impulse towards alternative futures has been manifested in African American culture, thereby providing a larger context for my explication of the utopian tendencies in Baldwin’s work. Chapter 2 focuses on the theoretical framework developed and used in this political reading of Baldwin’s novels. Firstly, this entails a brief overview of the premises of Jameson’s thinking, with particular emphasis on his theory of the political unconscious and the three horizons of textual interpretation. This will be followed by an explication of the two central concepts which constitute my methodology of reading Baldwin politically: ideology and utopia. The discussion will then move on to what may be considered to be my contribution to literary theory, that is, my understanding of the dialectic of ideology and utopia as a constitutive dynamic at work in literary texts. What this means is that I have started from the premises laid down by Jameson’s thinking, and I have then worked my way towards a more systematic and elaborate notion of this fundamental dialectic. In other words, I have aspired to do what Jameson has not, in effect, sought to do in The Political Unconscious, that is, to shape this theory into a tool of textual analysis instead of arguing for the primacy of the Marxist perspective over all other theoretical traditions.¹⁸ This has enabled me to adjust the theory of the political unconscious and transform it into a useful methodological tool which facilitates the explication of the political dimensions of Baldwin’s novels.

The analytical chapters of this book place the three selected novels by Baldwin within the framework of the political unconscious by examining how the categories of race and sexuality function on each of these levels. In Chapter 3, my reading of the dialectic of ideology and utopia in Go Tell explicates the ideological closure of home and the spatial configurations of the utopian impulse to open up this oppressive closure. In Chapter 4, I will provide an account of Tell Me which foregrounds the crucial role of the syncretic figure of Black Christopher and the transgressive interracial and same-sex relationships which bring him into being. This reading breaks new ground by highlighting the importance of this still rather neglected novel in Baldwin’s oeuvre. Chapter 5 analyses Baldwin’s last novel, the ambitious Just Above, as part of the Black counterculture of modernity and, simultaneously, as its critique. This entails an overview of Paul Gilroy’s account of the Black counterculture in his seminal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), which is followed by a discussion of Just Above as a reaction against White racism and, on the other hand, against heteronormativity, both White and Black. These analytical chapters will form an account of Baldwin’s work and legacy in terms of postcategorical utopia, a conceptualization of the underlying emancipatory, teleological current, which becomes visible and is developed further in each of these novels.