With Eddie Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, the recent surplus of James Baldwin features has grown another monograph larger. Begin Again quickly climbed bestseller lists, earning a number of glowing reviews — hardly surprising, given that, over these past few years, Baldwin has certainly been back in vogue. This summer, we may have reached peak Baldwin: Instagram was rife with the author’s quotations, and his books topped “anti-racist reading lists.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates is often credited with kickstarting the Baldwin revival. His 2015 bestselling epistolary memoir, Between the World and Me, mimicked the structure of the popular essay that comprises half of Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963). In an open letter to his nephew, Baldwin sounds off on the apocalyptic consequences of American racism, while Coates reflects on the same ever-present force in an extended letter to his son. While much distinguishes Baldwin’s writing from Coates’, both brandish a mode of collective address, inhabiting the role of native informant and laying bare the inner life of racialized communities. Ultimately, both books provide pseudo-psychologized accounts of interpersonal race relations: Baldwin boils Black consciousness down to a state of fury while Coates diagnoses racists as “people who believe they are white.” Baldwin introduced the American reading public to these formulae, and Coates has helped ensure that we will stick to them. Within the academy, we’ve seen an outpouring of Baldwin publications including James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination (2014), The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race (2017), and James Baldwin in Context (2019). The Baldwin resurgence has extended to movie theaters and streaming services as well. In 2016, Baldwin’s unpublished Remember This House was delivered to contemporary audiences in the form of I Am Not Your Negro. Two years later, Barry Jenkins’s film adaptation of the Baldwin novel If Beale Street Could Talk opened to sold-out theaters. Most recently, Baldwin appeared on the first season of HBO’s Lovecraft Country: his voice emanates from the radio as the show’s central Black characters drive across the Midwest. Set during the Jim Crow era, the characters encounter segregated lunch counters, unfettered racists at gas stations, and an unemployment line composed entirely of African Americans. Listening to Baldwin restate and respond to the question “does the inequality suffered by African Americans hinder the American Dream?” brings the show’s sinister portrait of malt shop America into sharp relief.