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Douglas Field. James Baldwin. Devon: Northcote House, 2011. 128 pp. $19.95.
D. Quentin Miller. "A Criminal Power": James Baldwin and the Law. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2012. 224 pp. $45.95.
Aself-declared "disturber of the peace," James Baldwin (1924-1987) was one of the most important writers and controversial cultural critics of the twentieth century. His many novels, short stories, essays and plays have become influential standards in the American literary canon, but Baldwin scholarship is less settled. Baldwin continues, posthumously, to disturb the peace and the status quo through the fresh surge of critical interpretations of his work. We can readily observe, building on (and occasionally upending) the previous scholarship on Baldwin, this critical interest reflected in the plethora of recent conferences, anthologies, and critical collections dedicated exclusively to Baldwin in the last few years. This attention to his life and work is all the more striking because single-author-focused monographs and conference sessions have been in decline in the last decade with the move away from literary histories based on "great men." The critical celebration of this black, gay, expatriate does not, thankfully, represent a return to that approach, with its implied assumption that history is made by a handful of exceptional men who putatively rose above time and place.
Two recent books on Baldwin consider him, by contrast, as an individual of- not above-his time, understanding his iconoclasm as a function of the cultural and political contexts that defined him as other. D. Quentin Miller's engrossing pageturner "A Criminal Power": James Baldwin and the Law and Douglas Field's slim but comprehensive...