James Baldwin’s Discourse on Democracy: Dynamic Constructions of Space in The Fire Next Time and If Beale Street Could Talk

This thesis represents a contribution to James Baldwin scholarship that considers how his representation of spaces, both public and private, in fictive and non-fictive works is deeply rooted in a racialized history marked by chattel slavery, Black Codes, Jim Crowism, and the Black Arts and Civil Rights Movements. For Baldwin, this painful reality contextualizes democratic discourse and practice that highlights America’s failure to make good on its promise to all citizens. Baldwin’s positioning of the subject in a multivalent, spatial matrix to measure democratic practice—merits attention. This matter of subject location is important to the individual because it largely determines their self-concept and how the individual will interact with others. It follows that any disruption of one’s understanding of personhood is devastating because it reorders reality on every level (as Baldwin poignantly states in The Fire Next Time). Baldwin’s use of space is dynamic in that for Baldwin, and for this study, space represents both subject and method of investigation. Space is the thing studied in this thesis, but it is also the critical lens through which I examine Baldwin’s reflections on the integrity of American democracy. This interrogation shows Baldwin’s complex understanding of the impact of spatial boundaries on the individual—space determines citizenship, esteem, and social status. Drawing from George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, Eddie S. Glaude’s Democracy in Black, Mae Henderson’s Borders, Boundaries and Frames, Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, and Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, this interdisciplinary study reveals how Baldwin unpacks spatial discourse and imagination to expose the flaws and shortcomings of American democracy for Blacks.