‘Seeing beneath the formlessness’: James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Restorative Urbanism
Chapter
Abstract
‘Havens are high priced’, declares James Baldwin, introducing his landmark collection of essays, Nobody Knows My Name, his 1961 follow- up to Notes of a Native Son (1955). He continues:
The price exacted of the haven-dweller is that he contrive to delude himself into believing that he has found a haven. It would seem, unless one looks more deeply at the phenomenon, that most people are able to delude themselves and get through their lives quite happily. But I still believe that the unexamined life is not worth living: and I know that self-delusion, in the service of no matter what small or lofty cause, is a price no writer can afford. His subject is himself and the world and it requires every ounce of stamina he can summon to attempt to look on himself and the world as they are. (Baldwin, 1961, p. 12)
Keywords
Urban Space Urban Scene Complicated Articulation Urban Experience Ideal City
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Notes
- 1.Tracing Baldwin’s adoption of the genre of prophecy in The Fire Next Time (1963) and No Name in the Street (1972), George Shulman notes how ‘[i]mperative assertions - about how we must see our situation and our history to bring ourselves out of it - take conditional form: you must stop doing x and start doing y if you would flourish. We feel we cannot argue back, but he is stating the price of the ticket, not commanding us to obey, and we are free to ignore him, albeit at our peril’ (Shulman, 2011, p. 118).Google Scholar
- 2.For an elaboration of this generic characteristic of’social dreaming’, see Sargent (2000, p. 15).Google Scholar
- 3.Baldwin here could be seen as standing, not without formal and ideological complications, at the crossroads of two genres noted by Ruth Eaton: ‘Running parallel to the utopian literary genre is that of the ideal city. In the former, the social arrangement appears to be of primary concern and the urban of the secondary; in the latter, this is usually reversed’ (Eaton, 2000, p. 121).Google Scholar
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© David James 2013