History of Ideas: James Baldwin

This week David discusses James Baldwin’s ‘Notes of a Native Son’ (1955), an essay that combines autobiography with a searing indictment of America’s racial politics. At its heart it tells the story of Baldwin’s relationship with his father, but it is also about fear, cruelty, violence and the terrible compromises of a country at war. What happens when North and South collide?

More on Baldwin from the LRB:

Michael Wood on Baldwin and power 

‘James Baldwin’s thinking recalls Virginia Woolf’s view of the way that women have been used as mirrors by men.’

Colm Toibin on reading Baldwin

‘James Baldwin’s legacy is both powerful and fluid, allowing it to fit whatever category each reader requires, allowing it to influence each reader in a way that tells us as much about the reader as it does about Baldwin.’

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