Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality; Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University
James Baldwin: The Making of an American Icon

In his Academy project, about the American author and activist James Baldwin (1924-1987), Reid-Pharr is concerned less with revealing Baldwin’s psychology than with mapping the contradictions that underwrote his celebrity. How did an African American “queer” author, often derided during his lifetime as ugly, hysterical, effeminate, and bombastic, become one of the most prominent intellectuals of his generation? Drawing on newly available materials in the James Baldwin Papers at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and materials at Yale University’s Beineke Library, Reid-Pharr’s work will explore the idea that “the celebrity” represents a negotiated terrain of significance. He thus resists celebration of Baldwin’s singular genius and instead focuses on the ways in which Baldwin’s celebrity represented systems of signification in which competing ideals clashed and re-formed into structures of meaning that were inherently unstable—and thus infinitely available for both criticism and adoration.

Photo: Annette Hornischer

Robert F. Reid-Pharr is Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality as well as African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He has also worked at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, The Johns Hopkins University, College of William and Mary, American University of Beirut, University of Oxford, and University of Oregon. He completed his BA in political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and PhD in American Studies at Yale University. Reid-Pharr’s work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Bogliasco Foundation, and Guggenheim Foundation. He serves on the editorial advisory committee of Callaloo and the international advisory board of the Freie Universität’s research group “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective.”

 

A specialist in both African American culture and the field of race and sexuality studies, Reid-Pharr has published four books: Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique (NYU, 2016); Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American (Oxford, 1999); Black, Gay, Man: Essays (NYU, 2001); and Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (NYU, 2007). His essays have been published in magazines and journals including American Literary History, Chronicle of Higher Education, Women and Performance, Transition, The African American Review, Feminist Formations, Art in America, and Radical America.

Meet Robert F. Reid-Pharr

A short portrait filmed at the Hans Arnhold Center, introducing the work and ideas behind fellows’ projects in Berlin.

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Robert Reid-Pharr argues against James Baldwin’s tendency to privilege the place-based specificity of American and especially African American culture.

18 May 2021

How did a poor, queer African American, like Baldwin become one of the most celebrated spokespersons of his generation for African American culture and the Civil Rights movement?

2 Mar 2021

Berlin Journal Articles

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Berlin Journal Articles

Little White Overcoats

James Baldwin and writerly trust

15 May 2021

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Fellow Spotlight: Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Robert F. Reid-Pharr is mapping the contradictions that underwrote the celebrity of writer and activist James Baldwin.

10 May 2021

James Baldwin: The Making of an American Icon

Robert F. Reid-Pharr demonstrates how James Baldwin’s literary genius propelled him into the worldwide spotlight..

2 Mar 2021

Podcasts

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Explore Past Fellows

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