James Baldwin’s Ambivalent Encounters with Africa
In this talk, Laila Amine critically assesses American writer James Baldwin’s encounters with West Africans and North Africans to challenge longstanding presumptions.
For many scholars of the African diaspora, the genre of travel writing represents a worldview largely informed by Western conquest and colonization. In this talk, Laila Amine critically assesses American writer James Baldwin’s encounters with West Africans and North Africans—described in essays he wrote between 1950 and 1972—to challenge a longstanding presumption: that Black writers in the US and Europe transcended the limits of travel-writing in order to stand in opposition to colonialist concepts of modernity. Not so with Baldwin, Amine argues, contending that his African essays demonstrate how his own travel and self-imposed exile implicate dislocated subjects in complex networks of power. In so doing, they are as likely to reassert Europe’s colonial and racial logics as to challenge them.
Meet the speaker
Laila Amine is an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She completed her BA at the Université Victor Segalen (Brest, France) and MA in African American and African diaspora studies at Indiana University, where she also completed a double PhD in comparative literature and American studies. Amine previously worked at the University…
