James Baldwin, Research Paper Example

For my first paper on James Baldwin and his stories about Harlem during a culturally tumultuous epoch, I looked primarily at his short stories in order to draw insights about the time period in which he lived. In addition, I looked at sources about the life of the author himself in order to better comprehend what life events and cultural trends impacted the contours of his literary works. By looking at the personal background of Baldwin and his short stories, I was able to glean information about the time period in which he penned his works.   Racism is a ubiquitous theme that is investigated in Baldwin’s works because of how profoundly it permeated the lives of Baldwin and other members of subaltern groups. Indeed, the 1950s was an epoch in which the Civil Rights Movement gained traction as an assault on the racial status quo that rendered African Americans as second-class citizens. More historical sources could have been used in order to further add credence to the conclusions I drew about race in America as evident through Baldwin’s writings. Racial violence and racial aggression did not take place in a vacuum but rather has deep roots in American society. Such institutional and structural racism perpetuated such acts of violence, which could have been described more in detail using monographs and scholarly articles. Lynching should have been discussed more in this paper because it emerged as one of the most uninhibited practices perpetrated by white Americans. Moreover, the police often served as spectators in lynching incidents, a phenomenon that was investigated by civil rights activist Ida B. Wells.  Such a discussion would have provided nuance to this paper. Nonetheless, I was most interested in studying how African Americans were represented and perceived in literary works by members of the black community in Harlem. Many of Baldwin’s works proffered a sociocultural, political, and economic critique of endemic poverty and systemic racism that continues to hamper various subaltern communities. Despite his struggles, Baldwin was able to carve a niche out for himself within African-American literature during an epoch in which profound social and cultural rifts were created as a result of progressive movements for gay rights and civil rights. Secondary literature such as scholarly monographs on epochal exigencies related to race would have enhanced this paper. Nonetheless, I used databases on the internet in order to collect information on the author and the historical period in which he lived, although a more meticulous search on scholarly databases such as JSTOR and Ebsco would have enhanced it.

In my second paper on the film The King, a short biopic that traced the life of the renowned and seminal civil rights leader Martin Luther King, I watched the series in its entirety and I read various movie reviews and critiques from the New York Times  in order to formulate my own opinion and interpretation of how the miniseries discursively portrayed the figure of Martin Luther King. This miniseries won an Emmy award despite the blaring historical inaccuracies evident in it. This film delved into many of the same themes that James Baldwin used in his own writings with regards to social justice, black consciousness, civil rights, and the racial status quo. Many scenes from the miniseries explore different components of racial inequity and injustice that pervades American culture and society in addition to how advocates of white hegemony put forth efforts to undermine any and all collective efforts to thwart the racial status quo by Reverend Martin Luther King and his followers vis-a-vis lynching and other forms of unwarranted and explosive violence. The sources I used were of sound quality, and the movies reviews merely had a problem with the fictive scenes such as the imaginary conversation between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. I think the paper could have been enhanced by using more scholarly sources on the mini-series itself. Nonetheless, there was sound research on the epochal contingencies around the film, which granted it currency and more validity. More movie reviews should have been used in order to provide nuance to this paper.