John E. Drabinski

Orality and the Slave Sublime

The problem of orality raises a cluster of important questions. For cultural politics, orality establishes precisely the sort of locality that resists transaction across borders and the ever precarious travel of globalization. This is the sort of resistance that allows Bernabe, Chamoiseau, and Confiant, in one of their strongest moments as a theorist-collective, to draw a rather bold line between creolite and diasporic writing. In this sense, orality gathers together a full range of theoretical problems that, in turn, transform questions of home, language, history, and meaning. For epistemology, and this works intimately with a cultural politics of resistance, orality represents a mode of knowing and transmitting knowledge that is subject to a time other than the global. To be sure, orality is sustained by national cultural borders in a manner that is productive to expression and cultural formation while at the same time engaging the global forces at work in, say, the chaotic dialectic of creolized and vernacular languages. And this epistemology draws on a metaphysics which in turn produces an important, nuanced ethical sensibility: if the ultimate reality of orality lies in the unfolding dynamics of local speech acts and exchanges, then an openness toward the otherness—simply the Other—of language is not only an interesting frame for thinking orality, but actually an imperative without which the meaning, knowing, and cultural politics of orality is impossible.

James Baldwin and the Question of Privacy: A Roundtable Conversation at the 2014 American Studies Convention

Six key Baldwin scholars converged at the 2014 American Studies Association to consider the question of privacy, informed by their own book-length projects in process. Key topics included Baldwin’s sexuality and the (open) secret, historical lack of access to privacy in African-American experience, obligations for public representation in African-American literary history, Baldwin’s attempts to construct home spaces, public access to Baldwin’s private documents, and ethical matters for scholars in creating and preserving Baldwin’s legacy, including his final home in St. Paul-de-Vence.