James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination

For many readers and scholars, James Baldwin occupies so central a place in black gay literary history that he has become a key representative for queer creative culture. James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination seeks to complicate this view by providing a sustained investigation of the queer implications of Baldwin’s writing while addressing the problematic appropriation of Baldwin as the standard-bearer of queer literary history and African American writing. Author Matt Brim argues that Baldwin’s queer imagination is highly complex and anything but obvious, that queerness emerges unevenly in Baldwin’s fiction, in ways that can be as restrictive as they are revelatory, and that his work exemplifies what the author terms an “unqueer” undercurrent present in queer creative thought. In demonstrating Baldwin’s ambiguity, Brim also provides a critique of queerness from within queer studies.