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“... books like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Jesmyn Ward’s anthology The Fire This Time, James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird and the poet Claudia Rankine’s award-winning Citizen. In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, on receiving the MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant, Rankine acknowledged as much: ‘To me, the getting of this honour is ...”

“... and idealism is empty. Jack Kennedy is alive. Martin Luther King is alive. Bobby Kennedy is alive. James Baldwin is alive. Janis Joplin is alive. Jack Kerouac is alive. Jimi Hendrix is alive. Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim Morrison and Robert Penn Warren are alive. Richard Nixon is dead; and a ...”

“... an echo in Manthia Diawara’s answer: I see Toni Cade Bambara, I see Kamau Brathwaite, I see James Baldwin, I see Bob Marley, I see James Brown, I see C.L.R. James, I see Muhammad Ali, I see Paule Marshall, I see Malcolm X, I see Edwidge Danticat, I see Walter Mosley, I see ...”

“... Signoret), she got more and more famous and came under more and more pressure. In New York she met James Baldwin, LeRoi Jones and Langston Hughes, who educated and politicised her. In 1962 she had a baby and a wet nurse was found for the child so she didn’t have to stop touring. A year later Simone finally got to play at Carnegie Hall, not Bach, but ...”

“... activist, which allowed Franzen to go whole hog on the rottenness of techno-capitalism. When James Meek reviewed the novel for the LRB (24 September 2015), he argued that too much of it read like ‘extracts from workaday op-eds’ and regretted that Franzen was more invested in the Assange-ish character than in the storyline about a young woman trying ...”

“... advocate, but she was unequivocally disdainful about the integrationists from the North. When James Baldwin toured the southern states in 1957, O’Connor had the opportunity to meet him. She chose not to. Her excuse was that she had to observe ‘the traditions of the society I feed on’. But perhaps it is also true that she felt tainted. Perhaps ...”

“... Mazzini, say, to a variety of Asian nationalists: Gandhi and Savarkar in India, Liang Qichao and James Sanua in Egypt (figures explored in his fascinating book of 2012, From the Ruins of Empire). Mishra’s model isn’t just Rousseau himself, but the superfluous man of 19th-century literature who reappears in all modernising countries: the ‘alienated ...”

“... force on the part of the police.In his letter from Harlem in 1960, ‘Fifth Avenue, Uptown’, James Baldwin writes that the police officer moves through the inner citylike an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country; which is precisely what, and where, he is, and is the reason he walks in twos and threes … He can retreat from his uneasiness ...”

“... However you construe the evidence, Cambridge was a victim of what the historian of slavery James Walvin calls ‘plantocratic revenge’: legal or irregular retribution – whipping, shackling, lynching – that was used to punish rebellious behaviour or to make an example of someone in order to deter revolt. ‘Scratch a planter,’ Walvin ...”

“... Lillian Hellman, Isaiah Berlin, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Harry Levin, W.H. Auden, Malraux, James Baldwin, Stravinsky, Robert Lowell etc. None of these people, however, furnishes Wilson with anything like a satisfying number of thoughtful passages in the journals. This is partly a result of misleading editing by Lewis Dabney, who divides the book ...”

“... Cabin. Melville’s Babo – intelligent and coldly resolute – would find no place in what James Baldwin called the ‘virtuous sentimentality’ of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Yet it was Stowe’s novel, with its messianic depiction of black suffering, that fuelled the crisis of the 1850s. Melville’s work made no impression on the anti-slavery ...”

“... such as ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’, ‘Alas, Poor Richard’ and ‘Many Thousands Gone’, James Baldwin rejected the role of ‘Negro writer’ and ‘categorisation’ more generally; Irving Howe defended Wright in ‘Black Boys and Native Sons’; then Ellison, caught in the crossfire as the author of Invisible Man, shot back at Howe in ‘The ...”

“... images and exhausted subjects; from Glen Ligon’s black on black painting of a paragraph from a James Baldwin essay to Chohreh Feyzdjou’s smearing of black pigment on jars and boxes that contain the scrolled text of her autobiography. As Enwezor envisaged, many ‘new relations of spectatorship’ were introduced, relations which drew on the tragic ...”

“... women, between white feminists and Black feminists, between straight women and lesbians. Like James Baldwin, she thought social revolution required a reckoning of all relationships, including the individual’s relationship to herself. As she writes in ‘Learning from the 1960s’: ‘If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for ...”

“... was in due course used as a blanket for the infant Langston (a middle name – he was baptised James, after his father). Mary’s next husband, Charles Henry Langston, was an abolitionist too; he insisted they name their son after Nat Turner, the leader of the 1831 Virginia slave revolt. His younger brother, John Langston, became one of the most prominent ...”