James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Reagan Era
By the 1980s, critics and the public alike considered James Baldwin irrelevant. Yet Baldwin remained an important, prolific writer until his death in 1987. Indeed, his work throughout the decade pushed him into new areas, in particular an expanded interest in the social and psychological consequences of popular culture and mass media. Joseph Vogel offers the first in-depth look at Baldwin's dynamic final decade of work. Delving into the writer's creative endeavors, crucial essays and articles, and the impassioned polemic The Evidence of Things Not Seen, Vogel finds Baldwin as prescient and fearless as ever. Baldwin's sustained grappling with "the great transforming energy" of mass culture revealed his gifts for media and cultural criticism. It also brought him into the fray on issues ranging from the Reagan-era culture wars to the New South, from the deterioration of inner cities to the disproportionate incarceration of black youth, and from pop culture gender-bending to the evolving women's and gay rights movements. Astute and compelling, revives and redeems the final act of a great American writer.
Tags
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
Short Review: This is a narrow book on Baldwin in the last years of his life focusing on the books/articles/works toward the end of his life and the cultural history of the era that influenced those final (several unpublished) works.
I was born in the early 1970s. I remember Regan being elected, but it was very early consciousness for me. I graduated from high school in 91 and James Baldwin had passed away before I was even aware of his name. While I have been doing a lot of reading of history lately, I have not read much on large scale history since the early 70s even though this was not mostly about the larger history of the 80s, there was enough context to be helpful to think about what the broader cultural history was all about.
The most interesting chapters for me were 4 and 5. The fourth chapter was about the rise of the moral majority and Baldwin as critic of Christianity. As someone that read a lot of theology for fun and has been to seminary, I think Baldwin gets some aspects of Christianity wrong. But in some ways that are fairly common even among Christians. And I think that he gets a lot of his critique of the Televangelists and Moral Majority right because of their lack of focus on the oppressed.
The fifth chapter on the Atlanta Child murders was fascinating to me because I have been in Atlanta area for just over a decade now. I am not from here, but my wife's family is. So this chapter is local history. I did hear from a friend that there was some DNA connection to Williams and some of the murder victims so that would be interesting to have teased out a bit. But also it seems likely to me that there was a racial component to the murders as well. It was 1981 that a Black man was shot in Cumming for simply being in the town (it was a sunset town with no Black residents in the whole county until almost 2000-you can read Blood at the Root for more about that.)
I appreciated some of the directly connections between Baldwin and how he is understood today especially as a father figure for the Black Lives Matters moment.
My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/james-baldwin-and-the-1980s/
