The Routledge Companion to James Baldwin

Introduction: A Century of James Baldwin

Yasmin Y. DeGout

Anna Pochmara

Tyechia L. Thompson 

Part I

Psyche, Affect, and the Body in the Works of James Baldwin

1 The Twilight of “les grands récits”: James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, and an American Quest

Eleanor W. Traylor

2 Wisdom of the Body in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain

Jacek Partyka

3 James Baldwin’s Black Queer Materialism in The Amen Corner

Justin Rogers-Cooper

4 Learning More and More about Anguish”: Reappraising James Baldwin’s Another Country

D. Quentin Miller

5 “A Bloodless Revolution”: Mourning and the Affective Stage in James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie

Kajsa Henry

6 Not “All Right”: Racism, Trauma, and Respectability in James Baldwin’s Going to Meet the Man

Courtney Mullis Sridharan

7 “A Dark Eros”: The Sadomasochistic Instinct in James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man”

Sonia Mae Brown

Part II

Intersectional Identities and Politics in the Works of James Baldwin

8 The Struggle over Race and History in James Baldwin and Margaret Mead’s A Rap on Race

A. Scott Henderson

9 Reimagining a Community: The Spectrality of Whiteness in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain

Ronnel Keith Berry

10 James Baldwin and the Ruins of Whiteness: Blues for Mister Charlie, Another Country, and Beyond 

Daniel Smith

Deirdre K. Price

11 Fathers and Sons: A Portrait of the “Lie of Whiteness” in James Baldwin’s Going to Meet the Man

Marja Lankinen

12 (Re)Claiming Black Liberation in Space and Place in James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk

Jennie Chaplin

13 “She Ain’t No Boy”: Relational Masculinity and the Politics of Protection in James Baldwin’s Little Man, Little Man

Andrea Y. Adomako

14 Exploring Racial Capitalism and Hegemonic Masculinity in James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni’s A Dialogue

Tyechia L. Thompson, Caitlin Dawson, Mary Duling, Destiny Haley, Amber Henry, Angela Lee, Jackson Lee, Melissa Ryan, Maysia Mateos, Brandon Rabenda, Sydney Sladden, Brendan Smith, Savannah Wheeler

15 Of Closets, Color, and Coming Out Narratives: The Question of Queered Enlightenment in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room

Michael Andrew Parra

16 Ideas and Black Velvet: James Baldwin’s No Name in the Street and a Black Radical Tradition

Bill Lyne

Part III

James Baldwin’s Philosophy and Political Vision

17 What Lies Do to the Negro: James Baldwin’s Existential Phenomenology

Corey Reed

18 James Baldwin’s Black Humanism: Energizing a Different Kind of Affirmation in Early Essays

Carol Wayne White

19 James Baldwin’s Philosophy of the Emotions 

Paul Cato

Vincent Lloyd

20 “Endless Connection”: James Baldwin’s Radical Vision of Love, Vulnerability, and Relationality

Anna Pochmara

21 “What It Is Like to Be Alive”: Artistic Witness in James Baldwin’s The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings

Lucy Onderwyzer Gold

22 “Love Is a Battle”: James Baldwin’s Love Letters in Nobody Knows My Name

Nicholas Buccola

23 Love in the Shadow of Racial Capitalism: An Analysis of James Baldwin’s Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone

Sean Kim Butorac

24 The Double Frame of Love and Survival in James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time

Teresa Gilliams

25 “A Talk to Teachers”: James Baldwin and the Call to Become Critical Pedagogues

D’Angelo Bridges

26 “Fire! Shut Up in My Bones”: James Baldwin on the Virtues of Not Being Cool 

Desireé R. Melonas

27 Reading “Staggerlee Wonders” Today: James Baldwin’s Poetics of Social Justice

Joanna Mąkowska

Marta Werbanowska

Part IV

The Works of James Baldwin across Sound, Image, and Performance

28 Soundscapes in James Baldwin’s Short Fiction: Representations of Sound in “The Rockpile” and “Come Out the Wilderness”

Sirpa Salenius

29 From Beale Street to Beat Street: James Baldwin through the Eyes of a Hip Hop Head

Aaron X. Smith

30 “Remembering a Usable Past: Understanding James Baldwin’s Sampled Promises in Contemporary Black Prophetic Writing

David Green

31 Entering James Baldwin’s “Cinema of My Mind”: Film-Viewing as an Act of Resistance in The Devil Finds Work

Björn Hochschild

32 Progress toward Freedom Narratives: Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro and Civil Rights Cinema

Jayson Baker

33 Voice v. Vision: Adapting James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk across Two Eras

Daniel Burns

34 James Baldwin’s Televised Debates and the Performance of Black Thought

Kamil Chrzczonowicz

Part V

The Works of James Baldwin in Transnational and Comparative Contexts

35 James Baldwin and Asia: A Transnational Dialogue with Asian Religion and Philosophy

Christopher Shinn

36 “A Kind of Revenant to Europe”: James Baldwin’s Continental (Re)consecration

Remo Verdickt

37 The Exiled Black Writer and Shakespeare: James Baldwin, George Lamming, and Dambudzo Marachera

Thorell Tsomondo

38 The Friend of the Fallen: James Baldwin in Aykan Safoğlu’s Off-White Tulips

Ece Aykol

39 Sovereign Power and the Threshold between Life and Death in James Baldwin’s Paris: A Transatlantic Reading of the Necropolitics in Giovanni’s Room

George Katito

40 New Contexts for Another Country: James Baldwin’s Letters to Mary Painter, 1955–1961

Dennis Chester

Biography

Yasmin Y. DeGout is an Associate Professor of English and serves as an Associate Chair of the Department of English at Howard University. She earned a Ph.D. from Howard University with a dissertation on James Baldwin, and she also reached the ABD level at Yale University in American Studies. She has published on the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, the short fiction of James Baldwin and his novel Giovanni’s Room, the poetry of Maya Angelou, the Black Arts Movement drama of Ed Bullins, encyclopedia articles on topics pertaining to the Negritude Movement, and historical fiction treating emancipation in the Danish West Indies/United States Virgin Islands. Her presentations have covered a range of topics, including Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, photographic representation of the Danish West Indies, Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey, African American homoeroticism, and the representation of notions of identity in Sugar Cane Alley.

Anna Pochmara is an Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw. As a doctoral candidate, she was awarded a Fulbright grant, enabling her to conduct research for her project at Yale University under the supervision of Hazel V. Carby. Since then, Pochmara has authored over thirty articles and chapters in American studies, along with two monographs: The Making of the New Negro: Black Authorship, Masculinity, and Sexuality (Amsterdam University Press, 2011) and The Nadir and the Zenith: Temperance and Excess in the Early African American Novel (University of Georgia Press, 2021).  In 2021, she edited and published a James Baldwin companion in the Masters of American Literature series (University of Warsaw Press). The African American Novel in the 21st Century, an anthology she co-edited with Raphaël Lambert, has just been released by Brill (2025).

Tyechia L. Thompson is an Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Tech. Her research spans African American literature, with a focus on African American writers in Paris after 1960, and digital humanities, particularly immersive technologies and archival scholarship. She is the author and filmmaker of the James A. Emanuel Project (2025), the instructor and executive producer of the iOS augmented reality mobile application Hip Hop Lit (2023), the author and producer of “Love and Suspense in Paris Noir: Navigating the Seamy World of Jake Lamar’s Rendezvous Eighteenth” (2019), and the creator of “Baldwin’s Paris” (2016). She has published in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Fire!!!: The Multimedia Journal of Black Studies, the College Language Association Journal, among other venues.  Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation.