Inflexions of identity in James Baldwin: readings in the light of Judith Butler's theory.

One hundred years after the birth of African-American writer James Baldwin, his work has gained renewed interest in academia, popular culture and social movements such as Black Lives Matter. Although he was considered ‘a Negro leader’ in the 1950s, his figure was vilified in the black liberation movements of the 1960s and his work marginalised in academic research until the 1990s. With the rise of queer theory and critiques of essentialism in identity politics, his essays and fiction, which explore the complexity of identity and the limits of the categories of race, gender and sexuality, regained relevance. Baldwin offered a contemporary critique of hegemonic discourses of sexual and racial difference, especially essentialist ontology. This thesis proposes to reread Baldwin in dialogue with Judith Butler, a philosopher with whom he has been conceptually linked, in order to reclaim his contributions on ‘identity’ and especially on ‘body’. Baldwin places corporeality at the centre of his deconstruction of the categories of ‘race’ and sexuality, which coincides with Butler's turn towards a sensitive ontology of the bodily subject at the turn of the century. Faced with the risk of a return to individualist ontology in contemporary identity drifts, Baldwin's work highlights the limits of categories and the need to think of ourselves as linked and vulnerable bodies.
 

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