McLarin on James Baldwin’s Legacy: GBH
Writing, Literature, and Publishing Professor and Interim Dean of Graduate & Professional Studies Kim McLarin joined Callie Crossley’s program “Under the Radar” to discuss the life and work of civil rights activist and author James Baldwin, who would be 100 this year.
McLarin says Baldwin’s artistry is also what made his work extraordinary:
He was an artist. He considered himself an artist. And an artist looks at everything, and he looked at everything: masculinity, patriarchy, racism and art, the role of art. Some of the things I love most by Baldwin are his essays about what it means to be an artist in a society which devalues and ignores the warning of poets, as he says. He was ahead of his time on queerness, and he was certainly restricted and oppressed because of that, even in the civil rights movement, which he was very much a part of. He was just ahead of his time in every way.”
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