“Dreaming of Some Vanished Relationship”: James Baldwin on Aesthetics and the Sacred

Abstract James Baldwin is a thinker of the potential of “the individual” in disenchanted modernity. Drawing on work by Ashon T. Crawley, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others, the essay explores this claim by tracing the resonances between the museum scenes found in two of Baldwin's novels: one in Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), where characters visit the Museum of Natural History, and the other in Another Country (1962), where they are dazzled by a work of abstract expressionism at the Museum of Modern Art. The echoes between the two scenes actualize Baldwin's suggestion that it is in aesthetic practices, whether within or outside the museum, that diasporic modernity's aborted potential can be resuscitated. In particular, at stake is the actualization of the self-generating diasporic subject, unbeholden, in protest or adaptation, to any preconceived schemas of white epistemology.