Document Type
Article
Department
Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Publication Date
2017
Abstract
The author reviews Raoul Peck’s 2016 film, I Am Not Your Negro, finding it a remarkable achievement as a documentary that breaks with cinematic conventions and emphasizes the importance of listening as much as looking. The director has singled out Baldwin as the writer whose work spoke most directly to his own identity and experience during his peripatetic childhood in Haiti and Africa, and in I Am Not Your Negro, Peck aims to ensure that Baldwin’s words will have a similar effect on audiences. However, even as it succeeds in reanimating Baldwin’s voice for a new political era, I Am Not Your Negro inadvertently exposes the difficulty of fully capturing or honoring the writer’s complex legacy. As scholars have long noted, interest in Baldwin’s life and work tends to divide along racial and sexual lines, and Peck’s documentary is no exception. The filmmaker privileges Baldwin’s blackness over his queerness by overlooking the parts of The Devil Finds Work and No Name in the Street in which the writer’s queerness figures prominently.
Publication Title
James Baldwin Review
Volume
3
DOI
10.7227/JBR.3.10
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Comments
Published under Open Access terms as:
Robert J. Corber. “Queering I Am Not Your Negro: or Why We Need James Baldwin More Than Ever.” James Baldwin Review 3 (October 2017): 160-172.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/JBR.3.10