james baldwin | Pandaemonium

AUTHENTICITY, IDENTITY AND LUTHER

April 18, 2021 by Kenan Malik

This is a longer version of a short piece published in the Observer, 18 April 2021. The African-American novelist Zora Neale Hurston’s final work, Seraph on the Suwanee, is set among poor Southern whites. Published in 1948, it’s often dismissed by critics as a “whiteface” novel because the lives and diction of the white characters seem too “black”, as if they were really black people in white masks. Hurston dismissed such criticism. “About the idiom of the book”, she wrote to friend […]

Categories: Britain, Culture & Books, Race & Immigration • Tags: authenticity, bbc, black identity, diversity, identity politics, idris elba, james baldwin, luther, zora neale hurston

LET AMERICA BE AMERICA AGAIN

January 19, 2017 by Kenan Malik

Here are five poems that won’t be heard at Donald Trump’s inauguration, but perhaps should be. Five poems about America written across the span of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, five poems that seem particularly meaningful now. The first, ‘Let America be America again’, is by Langston Hughes, one of the great figures of twentieth century American literature, and a titan of the Harlem Renaissance, much of whose work was, as it is in this poem, unpicking the […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: america, claude mckay, james baldwin, january gill o'neill, langston hughes, michelle boisseau, poetry

‘I DON’T HAVE TO BE WHAT YOU WANT ME TO BE’

June 5, 2016 by Kenan Malik

‘A strange fate befell Muhammad Ali in the 1990s’, Mike Marqusee writes in Redemption Song, his wonderful, illuminating study of ‘Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties’. ‘The man who had defied the American establishment was taken into its bosom. There he was lavished with an affection which had been strikingly absent thirty years before, when for several years he reigned unchallenged as the most reviled figure in the history of American sports.’ The global outpouring of grief, affection […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties, Sport • Tags: boxing, freedom struggles, islam, james baldwin, mike marqusee, muhammad ali, nation of islam, racism, sport, usa, vietnam war

JIMMY’S BLUES

May 10, 2014 by Kenan Malik

James Baldwin was one of America’s finest essayists. Perhaps the finest. He was a wonderful novelist, too. As a poet, though, he is far less known. Yet, as Nikky Finney writes in the introduction to Jimmy’s Blues, a new collection of Baldwin’s poems, he felt close to this particular way of saying. Poetry helped thread his ideas from the essays, to the novels, to the love letters, to the book reviews, stitching images and feeling into music, back to his […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: james baldwin, poetry

NO GOING BACK. THE ARAB REVOLTS AND THE REMAKING OF THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE

February 21, 2011 by Kenan Malik

The brutal, blood-soaked response of Arab rulers, especially those in Bahrain and Libya, to the revolts engulfing their nations exposes the desperation of old tyrants clinging to the past. But the revolts themselves reveal the extent to which the Arab political landscape has irrevocably changed. The ‘strong man’ model of rule that has held sway over much of the Arab world for the past half century has rested primarily on two props: the ability to constrain opposition at home, and […]

Categories: International, Justice & Liberties • Tags: arab world, democracy, egypt, islamism, james baldwin, muslims, nasser, olivier roy, palestine, protests, regime change, usa, western policy