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

The academic study of world literature was boosted around the turn of the millennium by three field-defining accounts of the dynamics that make particular authors and oeuvres count as world literature (Casanova; Damrosch; Moretti). Now that world literature has consolidated itself as an academic object of study, it has entered a self-reflexive phase. This project is part of this “critical world literature studies” moment (Helgesson and Vermeulen), as it tests different theoretical accounts and disciplinary assumptions through an in-depth study of how one particular oeuvre, that of the American author James Baldwin, acquired world literary value in the twenty-first century. In this way, it not only offers a key contribution to the flourishing field of Baldwin studies, but also an enriched understanding of the contemporary dynamics of the world literary field and an original intervention in theoretical debates over literary value. The twenty-first century consecration of novelist, essayist, and occasional dramatist and poet James Baldwin (1924-87) as a world literary author offers a promising case study for enriching our understanding of the dynamics of the world literary field. Posthumously, Baldwin has emerged as a world literary figure both within and outside of the academy. Outside the academy, and to a large extent outside the USA, there has been a “revival” since the late 1990s (Kaplan & Schwarz), as his work is increasingly invoked by a number of prominent writers such as Alain Mabanckou, Caryl Phillips, and Colm Toíbín; films inspired by his work, such as Raoul Peck’s 2016 I Am Not Your Negro and Barry Jenkins’ 2018 If Beale Street Could Talk make Baldwin’s work available to less literarily inclined audiences; Baldwin’s authority is repeatedly invoked in critical engagements with the recent global resurgence of white supremacy and nationalism (Coates; Ward), while his queer identity serves as a touchstone in debates over sexuality (Brim); and events like the 2014 “Year of James Baldwin” art festival in New York increasingly position Baldwin at the crossroads of different art forms and non- or para-academic discourses. The multiplicity of these engagements make Baldwin’s twenty-first century career a promising site for developing a multifaceted account of the various discourses and practices through which world literary value is generated. Within the academy, Baldwin’s work has also gained renewed currency. After Baldwin became a celebrated witness to the American civil rights struggle in the 1960s, his literary reputation in the USA declined in the 1970s and 1980s (Vogel) only to start to rise again around the turn of the millennium. This critical renaissance started with the publication of the collections James Baldwin Now and ReViewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen in 1999 and 2000 (McBride; Miller; Mirakhor); critics have observed a marked further intensificaton of scholarly interest since 2010 (with the launch of the annual James Baldwin Review in 2015). If scholarship on Baldwin has paid ample attention to his work’s relation to music, to religion (Hardy), to gender and sexuality (Brim), and to the civil rights movement (Polsgrove), it has only recently begun to investigate the resonances between Baldwin’s work and global imaginaries and developments. The increasing attention to transnational dimensions of his work is apparent in the 2011 volume James Baldwin: America and Beyond (Kaplan & Schwarz), Douglas Field’s All Those Strangers (2015), two books by Magdalena Zaborowska on Baldwin’s Turkish (2009) and French (2018) decades, and the 2011 “James Baldwin’s Global Imagination” and 2016 “James Baldwin, Paris, and International Vision” conferences. Still, the increasing interest in the transnational dimensions of his work have occurred in the context of postcolonial, “Black Atlantic,” or African American frameworks, and they have not been explicitly studied in a world literature framework (O’Hara is an exception). This project will develop a sustained dialogue between world literature studies and Baldwin studies that enriches both.