Harlem, Capital of World Literature? James Baldwin’s 21st-Century Career and the Dynamics of Contemporary World Literature

This project enriches and pluralizes our understanding of the global literary field by interrogating a basic assumption of the academic study of world literature: that the centrality of New York in the production, circulation, and evaluation of contemporary literature serves as a reductive and homogenizing filter. Through an in-depth and multi-faceted case study of the posthumous twenty-first-century world literary consecration of a New York-born American author, James Baldwin, this project tests a number of hypotheses about the multidirectional dynamics through which world literature value is created. Tying in with an increasingly transnational focus in the recent study of Baldwin’s work, the project breaks new methodological ground in combining analysis of the role of material, text-external elements (city marketing, literary and film festivals, literary anthologies) with close textual studies (of Baldwin’s late nonfiction in relation to established positions on diaspora, identity, exile, and cosmopolitanism). 

Keywords:contemporary literature, sociology of literature, world literature, African American literature, literature and film

Disciplines:Contemporary literature, Comparative literature studies, Literatures in English