A Study On James Baldwin: Beyond Race And Caste

Abstract

Baldwin’s words do not spring only from the experience of being black in America. His words essentially are of a man who has risked all to see beyond his blackness, who has daringly put all the actors in the historical crime of slavery in the witness box, where they are questioned by him about their cruelty, their silence, their violence, and their ability to inflict pain. Baldwin has questioned the entirety of America. Such an ability, to question the conscience of a nation like America-which is largely shaped by violence and silence—develops in a person after he has found the meaning of his own endurance to pain, in his own past and in that of his ancestors; and when he rises above all the categories which bind him in the present mentally.