Having been commissioned by New Yorker editor William Shawn to write a series of essays on Africa, James Baldwin left Paris in the fall of 1961 to begin a journey that would take him to Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya. But Baldwin never made it to Africa; from Paris, he traveled first to Israel as a guest of the government, where his encounter with the Zionist project influenced his thinking about diaspora, displacement, and political liberation in ways that shaped his political thought for decades to come. In a series of letters written to his literary editor, Robert P. Mills, Baldwin explicitly identified his time in Israel as a “prologue to Africa,” a way of “edging [him]self into” the psychically freighted questions about exile and return that would attend his trip to Africa (Baldwin 1963, 49). This paper looks at Baldwin’s letters and their afterlives. Specifically, I argue that attending to the way Baldwin mediates his feelings about Africa through his trip to Israel offers a philosophically rich picture of the entanglement of Black American and Jewish thought on diaspora, homeland, and political liberation.
Baldwin’s letters offer a layered reflection on the psychic experience of a diasporic, “homeless” person faced with the possibility of return. Describing sights from his travels—faces of passersby, the smell of the bazaars, a view of “the Arab-Israeli border” from a hill in Jerusalem—Baldwin works through his ambivalence about Black American identification with Africa through the prism of his encounter with the Zionist project in Israel/Palestine (Baldwin 1963, 49). What is at stake in the concept of ancestral homeland? What spiritual and/or psychic power does the idea of “returning” to one’s putative homeland exert on the diasporic imagination? Evincing on the one hand a sympathetic identification with Israelis that borders on jealousy and, on the other, horror at the system of borders and military checkpoints imposed upon Palestinians, Baldwin’s letters chart the psychic conditions that animate the displaced person’s desire for homeland. He suggests that longings for liberation and/or safety can easily become a kind of nationalist fantasizing that, if combined with state power, can become fuel for projects of domination. Drawing out the critique of exilic fantasizing that Baldwin develops as he reflects on his time in Israel, this paper will show that Baldwin’s rejection of Black separatism and thoroughgoing commitment to radical racial reconstruction in the US is both historically and conceptually tied to his assessment of Zionism.
While there has been a veritable explosion of scholarly research on James Baldwin, these letters receive scarcely any attention either in his intellectual biography or in studies of his political thought. As this paper will show, however, the letters not only trace interesting continuities between Black and Jewish debates about diaspora and nationalism, but also document a historical meeting between the two that seems to have led, almost by accident, to profound changes in the religious, racial, and political self-fashioning of Black and Jewish Americans. That is, in place of the promised essays on Africa, what Baldwin ultimately submitted to the New Yorker was his seminal essay “Down at the Cross,” later collected and republished in one of the most politically influential books of the 20th century: The Fire Next Time. I argue that this most famous and politically influential of Baldwin’s works, which decries religio-racial separatism and nationalism, exhorting American readers to take urgent action towards radical racial transformation, is deeply informed by his encounter with Jewish nationalism in Israel.
While scholarship that brings together Jewish studies and Black studies to discuss questions about difference, philosophical ethics, and racial formation has blossomed of late, as Jennifer Glaser has noted the “association of Jewish diaspora with Zionism has set up a particularly resilient road-block for transcultural work in Jewish studies” (Glaser 2013, 218). My paper takes up Baldwin’s writing on Black and Jewish nationalist longings as an opportunity to perform such “transcultural” work at precisely the juncture that has most resisted it. Moreover, by focusing attention on these letters as an intellectual and historical moment in which Black and Jewish thought on the topics of race, liberation, and political power were mutually informing in previously unrecognized ways, this paper also aims to heed Benjamin Ratskoff’s call for forms of transcultural work that proceed not from “neat comparative taxonomies of measure and equivalence” but rather “interwoven histories” (Ratskoff 2021, 19-22).
Baldwin, James. “Letters from a Journey.” Harper’s Magazine, May 1963.
Glaser, Jennifer. “Race, Ethnicity, Postcoloniality, and the New Jewish (Trans)Cultural Studies.” Literature Compass 10, no. 3 (March 1, 2013): 217–23. https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12033.
Ratskoff, Benjamin. 2021. "Waltzing with Hitler: Black Writers, the Third Reich, and Demonic Grounds of Comparison, 1936-1940." UCLA. ProQuest ID: Ratskoff_ucla_0031D_19645. Merritt ID: ark:/13030/m5dp0129. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6kd002xt
Drawing on a series of little-known letters James Baldwin wrote in 1961 during a visit to Israel, this paper argues that Baldwin’s time in Israel powerfully impacted his thinking about American racial politics and Black liberation. Baldwin’s letters weave together reflections on Black American and Jewish experiences of political exclusion, taking scenes from his travels as points of departure for thinking about diaspora, homeland, and political liberation. Attending to the ways Baldwin mediates his feelings about Black American identification with Africa through his experiences in Israel, this paper will show that Baldwin’s early rejection of Black separatism and thoroughgoing commitment to radical racial reconstruction in the US is both historically and conceptually tied to his assessment of Zionism.