Double Consciousness Squared: James Baldwin and the Minorities of World Literature

Abstract

"In this article, I suggest that Baldwin’s affinity with and influence on the literatures of queer and Black minorities are two prominent, although not exclusive, manifestations of Baldwin’s central position in a variety of modes of ‘minor’ literature, and that invocations of Baldwin’s minority status(es) are strategized as assets that enhance Baldwin’s circulation-and that of his invokers. My aim here is not to apply a restrictive and dogmatic theoretical straightjacket to Baldwin’s writings, but to situate his work, and that of some of the writers who explicitly affiliate themselves with him, within a broad and flexible framework in which minor strands of literary production circulate in a dynamic that is irreducible to the hierarchies of minor and major."