Perched in potential

Abstract

James Baldwin’s mobility and appreciation for African American musical traditions play an integral part in the writer’s crossing of genre and subgenre, his unique style, and his preoccupation with repeated themes. The interplay of music and shifting space in Baldwin’s life and texts create liminal spaces for Baldwin and readers to enter. In these spaces, clearer understandings of the importance of exteriority and interiority, simultaneously, are achieved. This in-betweenness is a place of potential and power. Baldwin’s writing uses this power to chronicle his own growing consciousness and to create, with his collective works, and through them, Baldwininan literary theory that applies to his own works’ use of liminality, the blues and travel. One is able to overhear Baldwin speaking to himself via his texts at multiple points in his nearly forty-year career.