He wrote fiery novels and essays that decried injustice and
racism, and now nearly 30 years after his death, Paris is hosting a conference
dedicated to the “expatriate” African-American writer James Baldwin.
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| The conference poster. |
The May 26-28 event, titled “A Language to Dwell In”: James Baldwin, Paris, and International
Visions, has attracted some 230
scholars and artists, who will examine Baldwin’s legacy and global impact.
“The most important thing for us is that this is about James
Baldwin – about his life, his work and his impact on readers around the world,”
says Alice Mikal Craven, a professor at the American University of Paris (AUP)
and co-organizer of the conference with her colleague William Dow.
“Baldwin is an academic subject matter, but at the same time
he had and continues to have a great impact on people’s lives,” Craven added in
an interview at a Parisian café, close to where the writer spent some of his
time during his many years in France.
The author of novels including Go Tell it on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room and Another Country, Baldwin was a prolific writer and
activist who also produced searing essays, plays and poetry about racism and
the effects of inequality.
Born in 1924 in New York, he had a tough childhood as the
stepson of a harsh Harlem preacher, and he experienced racial discrimination
first-hand growing up in the city.
He became a preacher himself in his teens, but then was disillusioned
with religion and finally found his calling as a writer. After a difficult
adolescence, during which he realized he was gay, he left the United States and
moved to France in the late 1940s.
There
he produced internationally acclaimed literature, made friends with other expatriate or exiled writers and artists, and remained actively
engaged in African Americans’ struggle for equality.
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| A 2004 postage stamp, honouring Baldwin. |
He also spent time in other cities such as Istanbul, but he
returned “home” to America several times to take part in civil-rights marches. Through speeches, lectures and press interviews, he was uncompromising in his condemnation of the racial situation of the
time and the hypocrisy of certain leaders.
“Paris had a big impact on his writing and on his life,”
says Craven. “Paradoxically, it made him want to reject the United States but also
go back and help. He was less constrained in Paris than in the United States.”
Craven – a white professor who grew up in the southern state
of North Carolina – said she was 12 or 13 years old when she first read
Baldwin’s books and felt supported in her own discomfort at what she saw around
her.
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| Professor Alice Mikal Craven (photo: M / SWAN) |
“The books spoke to
me because I was from the South and unhappy with things as they were, and upset
at hearing from adults around me that what I was witnessing was the way things
should be,” she said in the interview.
According to its stated aims, the conference “hopes to be an
international point of intersection for all those interested in Baldwin’s
writing, from literary and cultural critics, to political activists, poets,
musicians, publishers and historians”.
The numerous presentations, from a roster of
renowned experts, will take place at AUP and at other venues in the city. They
include debates about Baldwin and his relationship with “Art, race and Black
Power”; an examination of his short stories; a look at how his work is taught
today; and how his writing ties into the “Black Lives Matter” movement – which
has been sparked by cases of police killings of African Americans in the United
States.
Baldwin’s writing on homosexuality, and later gay rights,
will also be the subject of discussion in a panel titled “Sexuality, Homophobic
Masculinity and Sexual Paradoxes,” while his links with the church will feature
in “Baldwin, Religion and Black Liberation Theologies”.
Artists form a key component of the conference, which
equally explores the “responsibility of the artist in contemporary society”.
Here, artist-scholars and performers such as Abby Dobson, Kendra Ross, jessica
Care moore and Imani Uzuri will put forward their views about their own
activism through the arts.
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| Actress Gladys Arnaud. |
Up for debate, too, is the issue of who has the right to
tell whose story – a question that Baldwin perhaps transcended, with stories
that reach across racial, national and gender lines.
The France-based “Collectif James Baldwin” (founded by
French-Caribbean theatre director Samuel Légitimus) will stage a performance,
for instance, at the iconic American Church in Paris, the site where some
civil-rights marches wound up in France during the 1960s.
Gladys Arnaud, a Martinique-born actress and member of the Collectif, will read a monologue from
Baldwin’s 1954 play “The Amen Corner”, and she says that the author’s work has
particular significance for her both as an actor and as an individual.
“For me, James Baldwin represents tolerance,” she said in an
interview. “He was a great humanist, and he helped me to realize that you
shouldn’t accept things as they are but to try to understand how you can effect
change, without letting yourself be overcome by anger and bitterness.”
She added that through acting in plays that Baldwin wrote,
her comprehension of character complexity has also deepened, because no one is
ever “fully a saint or a demon – you can be both right and wrong as a
character”.
Baldwin’s legacy, she said, is the idea that we should all “accept
one another, in spite of our differences”. - A.M.
See INPS news agency for another version of this article: http://www.international-press-syndicate.org/index.php/arts-culture
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