![]() ![]() Presented in three books - or movements - the first listens to Baldwin, in the initial months of his most intense visibility in May 1963 and the publication of The Fire Next Time. The route retraces the full arc of Baldwin's passage across the pages and stages of his career according to his constant interactions with black musical styles, recordings, and musicians. Based on unprecedented access to private correspondence, unpublished manuscripts and attuned to a musically inclined poet's skill in close listening, Who Can Afford to Improvise? frames a new narrative of James Baldwin's work and life. In Who Can Afford to Improvise? Ed Pavlic offers an unconventional, lyrical, and accessible meditation on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin and their relationship to the lyric tradition in black music, from gospel and blues to jazz and R&B. More than a quarter-century after his death, James Baldwin remains an unparalleled figure in American literature and African American cultural politics. Baldwin evokes the experience of dislocated listening in his life and in “Sonny’s Blues.” Braggs also creates an experience of dislocated listening through her video performance of Baldwin’s words, thus attempting to draw the reader as well into a more attuned understanding of African-American experience. The distance disconcerts, leaving one more vulnerable, while music impels the reader, audience, and even Baldwin to identify with some harsh realities of African-American experience. ![]() Exploring her term dislocated listening, Braggs investigates how listening to music while willfully dislocated from one’s cultural home prompts a deeper understanding of African-American experience. ![]() Braggs argues that it was the combination of music, word, and migration that prompted Baldwin’s own deeper understanding. Baldwin’s blues resonated even more powerfully and painfully for its emotional and geographical dislocation. He continually privileged music in his literature, crafting his own literary blues to address it. It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear,” so wrote James Baldwin in “Many Thousands Gone.” Throughout his career, James Baldwin returned to this incomprehension of African-American experience. “It is only in his music that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. Baldwin’s integration of two distinctive leitmotifs, blood and song, is therefore read as a formal gesture toward a more capacious and migratory kinship. ![]() Baldwin represents errant kinship in JAMH through his inclusion of music and formal experimentation. In which he defines “errantry” as a fundamental characteristic of diaspora that resists the claustrophobic, filial violence and territorial dispossession that are slavery’s legacies. My approach to the novel’s portrayal of kinship is indebted to Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1990), By analyzing Baldwin’s representation of Hall Montana’s relationship to, and mourning of, his younger brother Arthur, this article argues that JAMH revises the terms of the black family to imagine an alternative, errant kinship that is adoptive, migratory, and sustained through songs of joy and grief. P>This article considers James Baldwin’s last published novel, Just Above My Head (1979), as the culmination of his exploration of kinship, reflecting on the ways distance and loss characterize African-American familial relations. ![]()
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