In important ways it is a book of this Time, however, it is not a book for this Time. Ideologically Glaude assures bourgeois liberal reformists that they still have time to return to bourgeois normality in a post Trump, post COVID 19 world. Rather than examine the radical potentialities of this moment, he writes from ideological and philosophical standpoints that are vastly different from Baldwin’s in important ways their opposite. While claiming to explain Baldwin’s fragility and despair, it’s actually about Glaude’s despair. The sentimentality of Glaude’s narrative should not obscure its interior logic nor its political and ideological commitments. Rather than seeing Baldwin oeuvre’s connection to this moment of crisis, Glaude reduces Baldwin to a “fragile queer man” and his most important essays, especially those contained in the book No Name in the Street, as responses to Baldwin’s trauma. What else can we conclude since the class conflict, the impoverishment of the proletariat, the unbelievable concentration of wealth, the precariousness of Black and Brown life, are not mentioned.

However, Glaude seems committed to the obsolete and unnecessary philosophies and worldviews shaped by liberal reformism and capitalist democracy. Such a moment cries out for the singularity of James Baldwin’s thinking on matters of social crisis and struggle. Inherent to this moment, as well, is the potentiality of radical societal transformation. This moment of uncertainty, political and social ambiguity, paradox and intensifying class, racial and social contradictions are so severe they could occasion societal collapse. “Baldwin imagined a new world and wide possibilities for struggle Glaude imagines nothing.”Įddie Glaude’s new book Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Time is not worthy of Baldwin, nor adequate as an ideological or theoretical interrogation of the current epoch of crisis. Glaude has done a great injustice to Baldwin, turning the great Black writer and thinker into a mere liberal burned out by trauma and a sense of his fragility.

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