WCP Faculty Research - Jeff Fallis

*********************************
There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
*********************************

Manchester, U.K. | Posted: October 1, 2018

Jeff Fallis's article in James Baldwin Review

Contact
No contact information submitted.
Sidebar Content
No sidebar content submitted.
Summaries

Summary Sentence:

Third-year Brittain Fellow Jeff Fallis has published his first peer-reviewed article, "'So sensual, so languid, and so private': James Baldwin's American South," in the 2018 edition of James Baldwin Review from Manchester University Press.

Full Summary:

James Baldwin has frequently been written about in terms of his relationship to geographical locations such as Harlem, Paris, Istanbul, and “the transatlantic,” but his longstanding connection to the American South, a region that served as a vexed and ambiguous spiritual battleground for him throughout his life and career, has been little discussed, even though Baldwin referred to himself as “in all but no technical legal fact, a Southerner.” This article argues that the South has been seriously underconsidered as a major factor in Baldwin’s psyche and career and that were it not for the challenge to witness the Southern Civil Rights movement made to Baldwin in the late 1950s, he might never have left Paris and become the writer and thinker into which he developed. It closely examines Baldwin’s fictional and nonfictional engagements with the American South during two distinct periods of his career, from his first visit to the region in 1957 through the watershed year of 1963, and from 1963 through the publication of Baldwin’s retrospective memoir No Name in the Street in 1972, and it charts Baldwin’s complex and often contradictory negotiations with the construction of identity in white and black Southerners and the South’s tendency to deny and censor its historical legacy of racial violence. A few years before his death, Baldwin wrote that “[t]he spirit of the South is the spirit of America,” and this essay investigates how the essential question he asked about the region—whether it’s a bellwether for America’s moral redemption or moral decline—remains a dangerous and open one.

Fallis's article examines the underconsidered topic of James Baldwin's engagement with the American South in his fiction, nonfiction, and drama from the late 50s to the early 70s and makes a case for the region's central importance in the development of Baldwin's psyche and career. It especially is concerned with the construction of identity in white and black Southerners and the South's tendency to deny and censor its historical legacy of racial violence. The essay, included in the 2018 edition of James Baldwin Review, is available online through the Manchester University Press website.

Related Links

Additional Information

Groups

Writing and Communication Program

Categories
Research
Related Core Research Areas
No core research areas were selected.
Newsroom Topics
No newsroom topics were selected.
Keywords
James Baldwin, American South, African-American Literature, Southern Studies
Status
  • Created By: rfitzsimmons3
  • Workflow Status: Draft
  • Created On: Oct 19, 2018 - 9:09am
  • Last Updated: Oct 19, 2018 - 9:09am