Baldwin’s Postcolonial Turn

This article explores the radical turn in James Baldwin’s writing of the late 1960s/early 1970s with a particular emphasis on the long essay, No Name in the Street (1972). The article proposes reading Baldwin’s essays of this period postcolonially as a critical key to unpick some of the broad cultural assumptions deployed in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s infamous report of 1965. Proposing the Moynihan Report as a significant periodizing milestone, the article will argue that Baldwin’s radical turn stands as a form of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak refers to as “strategic essentialism,” a form of “essentialist critique” which can become a powerful postcolonial weapon directed toward the “interrogation of … essentialist terms.” Reading the Moynihan Report and No Name in the Street comparatively, the article aims to illuminate a postcolonial aspect to the counterdiscourse provided by Baldwin’s increasingly radical, militant, and nationalistic polemics of the late 1960s and early 1970s.