Baldwin’s European Digital Circulation

For the past decade, James Baldwin’s newly accrued world literary value has been routinely linked to his presence in the digital sphere. This link has reinforced the default assumption of the Anglophone nature of Baldwin’s circulation, without much attention to linguistic and cultural differences. This article proposes to trace a more diversified account of Baldwin’s online footprint in the wake of Raoul Peck’s seminal film I Am Not Your Negro and the transatlantic reverberations of the Black Lives Matter movement through three crucial vectors: X (formerly Twitter), Google Search, and the pageviews of the biographical Baldwin entries on Wikipedia in French, German, and Dutch. Building on Melanie Walsh’s work on Baldwin’s circulation on Anglophone Twitter during the early years of the Black Lives Matter movement, we aim to excavate the intersections and tensions between different dynamics of online circulation in the non-Anglophone European sphere.