James Baldwin’ Confrontation with US Imperialism in If Beale Street Could Talk

The vexing subjects of transnationalism and imperialism have occupied recent meetings of the American Studies Association, building on much of the work done in the past two decades on multiethnic literary studies and diasporic feminism. (1) Groundbreaking postcolonial feminist theorists like M. Jacqui Alexander, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ella Shohat, and Robert Stam have each pursued the subject of transnationalism in recent work about multiculturalism and borderless feminism. Transnationalism has sparked a minor industry of scholarly publishing on the question of American empire. For Susan Gillman, we are "answering a disciplinary call to arms ... to rectify the absence of empire in the study of US culture" (196). Given the transnational turn in American literary studies--both celebrated and lamented--now is the time to consider what James Baldwin, one of the most prolific literary chroniclers of the experience of race and ethnicity in the twentieth century, can tell us about our current concerns with transnational contact and cross-ethnic solidarity. The publication of Dwight McBride's influential edited collection James Baldwin Now (1999) sparked a renewed interest in Baldwin. D. Quentin Miller's collection Re-Viewing James Baldwin (2000) examines Baldwin's neglected work; Lynn Orilla Scott rereads his later fiction; Douglas Field revisits Black Nationalist debates about Baldwin's sexuality; Sol Stein provides a new literary context for Baldwin's first essay collection in Native Sons (2004); Randall Kenan and Amy Sickel's 2005 re-release of their biography of Baldwin provides a lively sketch of his life; and McBride places Baldwin at the center of the emergent field of Black Gay Studies in Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch (2005). This renaissance often looks at Baldwin's neglected later work because, as Miller argues, "what has been lost is a complete portrait of his tremendously rich intellectual journey that illustrates the direction of African American thought and culture in the late twentieth century" (2). To appreciate more fully Baldwin's evolving sense of race and ethnicity in a post-Civil Rights and postcolonial era, we can examine how his later work addresses our current questions about imperialism and cross-ethnic solidarity in multiethnic American literature. This essay explores how Baldwin's overlooked novel If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) enters literary conversations about US imperialism, the placement of African Americans in imperialism, and the possibilities and limits of black-brown solidarity. Along with his last novel, Just Above My Head (1979), Beale Street has been seen mainly as Baldwin's response to the Black Arts movement, which stressed racial self-determination or separatism and advocated cultural nationalism; the novel has also been viewed as a conscious turn away from white characters, which harkens back to his 1953 debut novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (Farrison 81). However, what has not been noticed is how Beale Street refuses cross-ethnic racial solidarity when divorced from a larger critique of US imperialism and an awareness of how groups fit differently within structures of US empire. Beale Street was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and bestseller, but Baldwin did not fare so well with critics. (2) Baldwin's critics tended to dismiss the novel as an unsatisfactory portrait of racial pride and Baldwin was deemed largely irrelevant in a postintegration world. (3) For example, in his 1974 survey of Black literature in America, Arthur P. Davis describes Baldwin as an "integrationist" writer who reluctantly and belatedly accepted the lessons of Black Nationalism: Like all other sensitive Negroes, [Baldwin] has been touched by the doctrines of the current black revolution, but he is really a transitional writer. An avowed integrationist in his early works ... [h]is pilgrimage into blackness [and the Black Nationalist position] has been intense and passionate. …