"Black Body: Rereading James Baldwin’s 'Stranger in the Village'

Tju Cole, escritor, historiador de arte e fotógrafo, de origem nigeriana a residir nos Estados Unidos, revisita a obra do escritor americano James Baldwin (1924-1987),um nome incontornável nas lutas pelos direitos civis, a partir do texto Stranger in the Village, um ensaio onde reflecte sobre as tensões raciais com que se confrontou numa viagem à Suiça, numa reflexão que se alarga à relação entre brancos e negros no seu país, primeiro publicada na Harper's Magazine, em 1953, e depois incluído num dos seus mais famosos livros, Notes of a Native Son.

It recounts the experience of being black in an all-white village. It begins with a sense of an extreme journey, like Charles Darwin’s in the Galápagos or Tété-Michel Kpomassie’s in Greenland. But then it opens out into other concerns and into a different voice, swivelling to look at the American racial situation in the nineteen-fifties. The part of the essay that focusses on the Swiss village is both bemused and sorrowful. Baldwin is alert to the absurdity of being a writer from New York who is considered in some way inferior by Swiss villagers, many of whom have never travelled. But, later in the essay, when he writes about race in America, he is not at all bemused. He is angry and prophetic, writing with a hard clarity and carried along by a precipitous eloquence.

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