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Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
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About This Book
We live, according to Eddie S. Glaude Jr., in a moment when the struggles of Black Lives Matter and the attempt to achieve a new America have been challenged by the election of Donald Trump, a president whose victory represents yet another failure of America to face the lies it tells itself about race. From Charlottesville to the policies of child separation at the border, his administration turned its back on the promise of Obama's presidency and refused to embrace a vision of the country shorn of the insidious belief that white people matter more than others. We have been here before: For James Baldwin, these after times came in the wake of the civil rights movement, when a similar attempt to compel a national confrontation with the truth was answered with the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In these years, spanning from the publication of The Fire Next Time in 1963 to that of No Name in the Street in 1972, Baldwin transformed into a more overtly political writer, a change that came at great professional and personal cost. But from that journey, Baldwin emerged with a sense of renewed purpose about the necessity of pushing forward in the face of disillusionment and despair. In the story of Baldwin's crucible, Glaude suggests, we can find hope and guidance through our own after times, this Trumpian era of shattered promises and white retrenchment. Mixing biography--drawn partially from newly uncovered interviews--with history, memoir, and trenchant analysis of our current moment, Begin Again is Glaude's endeavor, following Baldwin, to bear witness to the difficult truth of race in America today. It is at once a searing exploration that lays bare the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we all must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America.
Reviews
"What sets this account apart is that Glaude understands how Baldwin's writing becomes a pathway for one's own thoughts; he's able to synthesise the novelist's work in a way that transcends summation or homage and becomes instead an act of breathtaking literary assimilation that acquires its own generative power ..."
"In prose that is eloquent and impassioned—sometimes hopeful, sometimes not—the author presses his fingers on our bruises, the ones many of us would prefer to ignore ..."
"This witness through the dark times, which Glaude argues are upon us once again, is, he says, the true measure of Baldwin's greatness: an enduring testament to his love and the belief that the US can and must be something more than it is."
"Applying these insights to the Black Lives Matter movement, debates over the removal of Confederate monuments, and modern-day identity politics, Glaude at times seems to be trying to fit three books into one."
"Begin Again is a groundbreaking and informative guide to Baldwin and his era, even as it remains an uncertain map of our own."
"Even if you don't agree with Glaude's interpretations, you'll find yourself productively arguing with them."
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