The Cross of Redemption at The Quarterly Conversation

The latest review at The Quarterly Conversation is Ed Pavlić’s review of The Cross of Redemption, a new book of previously uncollected writings of James Baldwin. Here’s a quote:

Baldwin insisted upon the need to change the implications of the language we speak. In “On Language, Race, and the Black Writer,” Baldwin writes: “Writers are obliged, at some point, to realize that they are involved in a language which they must change. And for a black writer in this country to be born into the English language is to realize that the assumptions on which the language operates are his enemy.” But, not so fast. Baldwin also knew one couldn’t banish an “enemy” with impunity. Born in the Harlem ghetto, “the Hollow,” (as opposed to Sugar Hill or another middle class part of Harlem), he’d already been banished himself. Thus, in “Anti-Semitism and Black Power,” he writes: “I would like us to . . . create ourselves without finding it necessary to create an enemy.” It follows that, in debates over standard English vs. black English in the late 1970s, Baldwin concluded: “everything must be learned but to be put to your own purposes.” What of Baldwin’s own purposes?

High among them was his will to force the English language we speak to “confess” where it came from. . . .

This week at The Constant Conversation–the weblog of The Quarterly Conversation–we’re also serializing Pavlić’s response to James Campbell’s New York Times review of Cross of Redemption. Installment 1 can be found here.

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