Browsing by Subject "Baldwin, James, 1924-1987 -- Criticism and interpretation"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    "How I Got Over": An Analysis of James Baldwin's Portrayal of Conversion
    (2010) Harrington, Jasmine L.; Johnson, Terrence L.
    This thesis considers James Baldwin’s novel Go Tell It On the Mountain to be the appropriate lens to examine the twentieth century black Pentecostal church. In an effort to understand the frequent propensity towards black self-hatred, it engages the phenomenon referred to as the white normative gaze. In Mountain, specific racial categories are introduced, applied and interrogated in an effort to demonstrate the complex wrestling between competing ideals and forms of existence. This thesis examines, through a logical progression of chapters leading up to an anticipated culmination of inner struggles, the conversion experience. Ultimately, this thesis not only addresses the problems that create a racially negative environment in the private black religious community, but it also suggests an alternative to the current practice of black Pentecostalism, one that Baldwin would appreciate and more than likely be an active participant.
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    James Baldwin's "Flesh and Blood" in No Name in the Street
    (2015) Nasim, Shahzeen; Solomon, Asali
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    Life in Our Language: Collaborative Imaginations of Home Through the Words of James Baldwin
    (2014) Hickey, Siobhan; Hucks, Tracey E., 1965-
    James Baldwin (1924-1987) was a writer who came to prominence during the American Civil Rights movement. During his career, he engaged issues of race, class, sexuality, and American identity through a plethora of novels, plays, short stories, essays, and more. A queer black man, Baldwin grappled constantly with these issues in his personal life as well. Much of his writing is autobiographical in nature, either directly or indirectly. His writing is also characterized by frequent ambiguity and contradiction, whether within a single sentence or between books written decades apart. Many early critics of Baldwin accuse this ambiguity of making his writing socially ineffective or structurally weak. This thesis asks whether there is a different way of reading ambiguity in Baldwin's work, one that highlights its abilities to create rather than obscure meaning. Through a trusting acceptance by the reader of the potential for Baldwin's ambiguity to be meaningful, a relational space is opened up between author and reader that allows it to become so. Within this space, the reader becomes the creator of meaning using Baldwin's language as a source of potential. I posit that this space may be thought of as homelike in the sense that it envelops reader and author alike, offering support through the process of meaning creation and consciousness expansion. I use Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Touching Feeling — a text within the growing field of affect theory — as a theoretical tool to unpack the nature of the space that ambiguous passages in Baldwin create. Sedgwick offers several ways of rethinking the relationship between language and knowledge that allow for deeper insight into a similar project on Baldwin's part.
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    Reading The Fire Next Time and The Autobiography of Malcolm X: Religion and Multicultural Education in the High School Classroom
    (2015) Sweeney, Abigail; Koltun-Fromm, Ken
    In the following thesis, I present The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley by Malcolm X and The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin as educational texts that productively open space for student exploration of religion in the high school classroom. Although similarly celebrated for their leadership and insight during the civil rights and black power movements, Malcolm X and James Baldwin held distinctive views as to the usefulness of religion in ameliorating racial injustice in the United States. For example, the Nation of Islam informed, gave language to, and sustained Malcolm’s perspective on race in America. Following his religious experience, however, Baldwin concluded that religion is a mask behind which we hide from our desire to love dangerously. Baldwin’s account of dangerous love offers a way to understand Malcolm’s second religious conversion, in which he moves closer toward radical reflexivity. Malcolm’s religious transformation models the challenging process of multicultural education, which encourages rearrangement of thought and reassessment of identity. Witnessing this transformation, students too engage in the process of multicultural education by questioning their own narratives of religion. Unlike race and gender, the study of religion is infrequently considered as crucial content in the field of multicultural education. By proposing that students read these texts in tandem to explore the nature of religion, I encourage a rather perplexing learning experience that deeply mystifies the notion of “truth.” In doing so, I show how the challenge of defining religion is entirely fitting for multicultural education in that it encourages constant questioning, learning through crisis, and critical exploration of self. Finally, I include a tangible resource for educators who are interested in using these texts to discuss religion in the classroom.
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