On Saturday, Nov. 2, six scholars from universities all over the country joined Swarthmore Professors Nina Johnson, Anthony Foy, Jamal Batts, and Isaiah Wooden for a series of panels discussing the role of James Baldwin in modern American life. The conversations took place from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Science Center, while faculty, students, Garnet Weekend visitors, and other members of the Swarthmore community flowed in and out throughout the day or watched via livestream.
The event took place as part of a centennial celebration of James Baldwin’s birth in 1924, sponsored by the 2024-2025 William J Cooper Series. The symposium followed a screening of Baldwin’s film, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” and a keynote lecture by Eddie Glaude, Jr. (who was interviewed by The Phoenix last week).
In communication with The Phoenix, Foy reflected on the planning behind the centennial events, saying, “Professor Nina Johnson (my co-organizer) and I wanted to do something for Baldwin’s centennial, so we began talking about some events before the deadline for Cooper applications rolled around last spring.” Foy continued, “We wanted to bring a group of thinkers together to reflect on Baldwin’s relevance to us today, and we picked some themes that would give our participants some room to stretch out more broadly. How might Baldwin’s work inform the way we think about the aims and actions of social justice movements now? How does Baldwin’s preoccupation with policing, prisons, and incarcerated folks throughout his career link to calls for abolition today? How does Baldwin’s vision of liberation at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and same-sex desire resonate with queer lives now?”
Foy began the event on Saturday with opening remarks that included a warning to avoid uncomplicated glorification of Baldwin. To do this, he cited a Baldwin quote on monuments and memorialization from “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”: “As Baldwin puts it, monuments are “one of the ways the Western world has learned (or thinks it’s learned) to outwit history, to outwit time, to make a life and a death irrelevant, to make that passion irrelevant, to make it unusable for you and for our children,” Foy cautioned. He continued, “We have planned this series of conversations not to make a monument of Baldwin, but to think about how he might live among us still, how his work calls upon us still to reckon with what history has made of us, how his words speak to us still of our time, not simply his. To put it simply, we’re here to think with Baldwin, not merely to think of him.”
Each scholar in the three panels gave brief introductory remarks, then engaged in conversation with each other. Foy told The Phoenix, “We were also thinking about these themes, collectively, as a way to give the symposium structure, but we wanted our guests to be able to think together on the fly, following their discussion wherever it would take them. That’s why we organized a series of conversations rather than asking our participants to present more formal lectures.”
The event’s timing during Garnet Weekend meant that it was accessible to families of students and other visitors, and it being the weekend immediately before the 2024 U.S. Elections framed many conversations throughout the day. However, Foy says that availability of scholars and looming world affairs were a higher priority for the event’s scheduling.
“This might be strange to say now, but we weren’t really thinking about the election while we were organizing these Cooper events (though it was clearly on people’s minds this weekend),” Foy said. “If anything, we were thinking even more about the horrors in Gaza when we began planning this series of Baldwin events. It’s impossible to think about “our times” without thinking about the ongoing genocide in Gaza. And some of Baldwin’s key preoccupations — such as the problem of willful ‘innocence,’ the ways that myths of origins, fables of national identity, varieties of self-delusion, etc. keep us from reckoning with the violent truths of history — are as incisive for us today, both locally and globally, as they were in Baldwin’s own time.”
The first panel of the day was focused on the theme of “Queer Lives Now!” and discussed Baldwin’s role as a writer on sexuality and gender, and what it means for those questions today. The panel was moderated by Swarthmore Assistant Professor of Black Studies Jamal Batts and invited Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman and Dagmawi Woubshet. Abdur-Rahman is a professor of American studies and English at Brown University who researches and writes about African American and African Diasporic literatures and cultures, gender and sexuality studies, visual culture studies, Black Critical Thought, and Black aesthetics. She is an award-winning essayist, and has authored two books, “Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race” (2012) and “Millennial Style: The Politics of Experiment in Contemporary African Diasporic Culture” (2024). Woubshet is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Associate Term Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, and a scholar of literature and visual culture. Woubshet has written extensively on the intersection of African and African American studies and gender and sexuality studies. He is the author of “The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS” (2015), and the co-edited volume “Ethiopia: Literature, Art, and Culture” (2010).
The Phoenix was unable to attend the first panel of the symposium.
In the second panel, scholars Salamishah Tillet and Maurice O. Wallace engaged with each other on “Social Justice Now!” and were moderated by Swarthmore Assistant Professor of Theater Isaiah Wooden. Tillet is the Henry Rutgers Professor of Creative Writing and Africana Studies at Rutgers University–Newark, where she is also executive director of Express Newark, a center for socially engaged art and design. She is the author of “In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece” (2021), and “Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination” (2012). She has received numerous fellowships and awards, and has founded several organizations and initiatives at the intersection of arts and feminism. Wallace is professor and associate chair of English at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, where he teaches African American literature, American literature, and Black cultural studies. He is the author of “Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775-1995” (2002) and “King’s Vibrato: Blackness, Modernism and the Sonic Life of Martin Luther King Jr.” (2022); he is also the co-editor, with Shawn Michelle Smith, of “Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity (2012),” and the winner of many awards for his writings.
During an in-depth conversation about what Baldwin’s writings can mean for modern social justice, the panelists closed on a discussion of Baldwin’s relationships. They discussed his relationship with playwright Lorraine Hansberry and what it meant to his career and life when she died young in 1965. Wallace highlighted Baldwin’s intense commitment to taking care of painter Beauford Delaney. “I’d love to explore the motivations, the feelings attached to that level of friendship. Is it a filial feeling? Is it a sensitivity born of a shared relationship between one’s art and one’s people? I don’t know, but I am struck by the depth of love, care and concern that Baldwin expressed for Delaney. Maybe it should be the norm, but it seemed to be extraordinary at the same time. And, to go back to what Salamishah has put before us, I think this way of thinking about friendship is an opportunity for any of us.”
Following this conversation, there was time for questions, where a listener asked about Baldwin’s relationship to the continent of Africa. Scholars chimed in about the transformation that Baldwin went through in his approach to the continent, from almost “estranging himself” to Africa by focusing on the kinship of Americanism between white and Black Americans to advocate for an omnibus civil rights bill to writing more about Africanism and African relationships after his first visit to the continent in 1962 and into his later works. In final thoughts, Tillet circled back to the way that Baldwin’s devotion to people wasn’t conditional on what their formal relationships were. And, the panel closed on a similar note, highlighting the “desperate need to care for each other if we’re going to survive.”
In the third and final panel, Marquis Bey and Marlon B. Ross engaged in a conversation on “Abolition Now!” moderated by the whole symposium’s organizers, Professors Foy and Johnson. Bey came to Swarthmore from Northwestern University, where he is professor of Black studies and gender and sexuality studies, a core faculty member in Critical Theory, and writes about Black feminism, LGBTQ studies, and abolition. They are the author of “Black Trans Feminism” (2022) and “Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender” (2022).
Professor Johnson of sociology introduced the panel by connecting Baldwin’s novel “If Beale Street Could Talk,” which explores how incarceration intersects with race, family, and intimacy, to the impact of incarceration on her own family and also to the teaching she has done inside prisons. She continued to facilitate the discussion on abolition and the question of how to “be free,” before she and Foy introduced Bey and Ross.
Bey began by declaring that “we are swimming, at least in the intellectual and political circles in which I travel, in a discourse of abolition,” and highlighting the need to balance the intense value of the concept of abolition with the fakeness that Bey sees as rampant in discourse. Bey continued on to reference Baldwin’s “Nothing Personal,” highlighting the potential of “alleviating ourselves of certainty” to use always shifting fluid classifications. Bey also chose to focus on two words: “self” and “imaginable,” and how people, even when thinking of abolition, assume that their current conception of themselves will still remain after abolition. Bey went on to articulate how Baldwin’s work serves as a reminder that our knowledge of ourselves is entangled with the structures many would target for abolition, and therefore we must “give ourselves up” in a post-abolition world. “Abolition is not merely about this big bad institution, but also the quiet worlds of our imagination. How we imagine what exists, what is possible and is often overlooked, is an often overlooked site of that which needs to be interrogated,” they said. They closed their initial remarks with, “To imagine what else there could be, not only for but as us, is precisely the abolition endeavor. It seems that the question, then, is, are we willing to pursue that paradigm?”
Ross started his remarks by taking the conversation towards the question of how Baldwin approaches intimacy in the pre-abolition world that he writes in and about. Ross thinks that while Baldwin might not have a clear-cut philosophy of abolition, Baldwin’s work addresses incarceration as part of a structure of racial economy. In a discussion of how Baldwin was haunted by and rejected parts of Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” a 1920 novel on racism and the American carceral state, Ross also talked with the audience about how Baldwin frequently played with the inside-outside dynamic of prison and captivity. For Ross, a person on the outside of that captivity is usually in place in Baldwin’s work to “frame the context of the person on the inside.” He continued to discuss how in “If Beale Street Could Talk,” that outsider is Tish, who also serves as a kind of prophet. In “Giovanni’s Room,” that outsider is David. That divide that Baldwin explores, Ross thinks, is meant to be a manifestation of the punitive state.
In response to the remarks of the panelists, Johnson reflected that “Baldwin gives us a refusal to despise ourselves and despise each other in the ways that the world invites us to daily.” Ross continued to explore that inside-outside dynamic, and what it means for “relying on the outsider” for change. And, Foy remarked on Baldwin’s notion that “there is nothing more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom,” given the intense vulnerability of being committed to work. To him, this applies to the potential work of abolitionism, and the solution is to do the work together. After discussions on what freedom really means in the context of abolitionism, and the relationship between Baldwin and religiosity, Johnson closed the panel and the day’s events with thank yous, reflections, and a reminder that “systems are not totalizing.”
Following the symposium, Foy expressed that he felt all the aspects of the centennial celebration — the film screening, Glaude’s keynote, and the symposium — were successes. “Nina [Johnson] and I are both proud to have given our community these various ways to reflect on the enduring legacy of James Baldwin, and I’m not sure that anything can detract from this special set of events.”
With that being said, Foy also expressed disappointment about the attendance during Saturday’s symposium. “This is a longstanding problem on campus — we’re all over-programmed and stretched thin — so I’m not casting blame on anyone, but occasions like this are also part of a rich college education; we organize such things to buoy students, and we’re always happy to see them energized and engaged.”
Foy was also sure to give thanks to many partners in facilitating the events, including to librarians Jessica Brangiel and Roberto Vargas for securing the film screened on Wednesday, a process that was more challenging than expected. “We have to say, too, that none of this could have happened without the support we received from the campus community, beyond the generosity of the Cooper fund. Our colleagues in Black studies — like Professor Joseph Nelson, Professor Jamal Batts, and Professor Isaiah Woodson — all contributed without hesitation. Cara Anderson and Emily Dabrowski in Communications went above and beyond. The English Department’s Administrative Assistant, Patti Coney, was amazing when it came to all of the logistics, especially in the last few weeks. [Lang Performing Arts Center Director] Jim Murphy runs a tight ship, and his team in LPAC were masterful this weekend.”
