The Great Space

Abstract: This essay revisits James Baldwin's celebrated, albeit controversial, criticism of Richard Wright's Native Son . Offering a close reading of Baldwin's "the great space" (a figure that combines sex, race, castration, and violence, and other forms of aberrant "protest"), the essay argues that this figure of displacement immediately displaces its own inability to name what constitutes this displacement. What I name "blacksexe" emerges here as the symptom of that displacement, the detail of which can also be seen in Eldridge Cleaver's infamous critique of Baldwin: his writing, his sexuality, and his (white-identified) notion of masochism. The essay concludes with a series of observations on how blackness can never be separated from the "real" of castration.