James Baldwin’s Reception in France in the Twenty-First Century

Based on writers’ or academics’ forewords and reviews in the French press over the last two decades, this article is a brief examination of the reception of the publication and republication of Baldwin’s work in France. It first sketches out the different “Baldwins” created by the French publishing world: the canonical author, the incisive writer of racial oppression and resistance, yet also, thanks to Cynthia Fleury, Baldwin the philosopher, the “universalist.” It then accounts for the paratextual elements of the publication and republication of his writings that delineate the context of his French reception, notably how he is read as answering France’s twenty-first-century woes. The last section addresses Raoul Peck’s and Teju Cole’s responses to Baldwin’s thought, political intervention, and early writing. This survey of Baldwin’s contemporary French reception traces how his voice has been repurposed for a particularly French cultural and national context. Indeed, emerging from these dialogues with Baldwin’s work are the current polemics among activists and scholars in colonial and postcolonial studies as France continues to struggle to address the legacies of colonialism and the “racial question.”