Baldwin, the Diaspora, and the Critical Documentarian

Abstract

Focusing on Baldwin’s later works from the 1970s on, this article posits that he began shaping an experimental nonfiction aesthetic that would allow him to “sing” lyrically, diasporically, and discursively while engaging in discourse with others. He improvised a means of enacting physically, essayistically, and cinematically his brand of witnessing, a mode I call the critical documentarian. Baldwin needed a structure capacious enough to express both his lamentation concerning the murderous, premature closure of the 1960s Black Freedom movement and his abiding hope in tangible, necessary sociopolitical change in the US and the West, while, simultaneously, moving the American language toward new territories of artistry. His approach in those books eschews “mere” memoir in favor of elliptical, comparativist, abstract analytical forms of personal essaying.