Racism and Sexism Questions
James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room
AFAM 100: Black Freedom Struggles
March 26, 2021
REVIEW OF CONCEPTS & THEMES
TIME
the book begins with the end and ends with the beginning;
David, himself, seems to be lost in or lose his sense of time (the memory of his life is fragmented and interwoven in the narrative arch of the story)
Rooms become a blackhole of time and space
Imagined time/moment of freedom and liberation= no sense of time in the unconscious (repression)
History of colonial and sexual violence
The history of colonial violence and the relations of heterosexual patriarchy are always connected
Slavery (partus sequitur ventrem)
Korean War (”Comfort Women”: American soldiers occupied South Korea and as part of their “recreation” established a system of non-consensual sex (forcing native women into captivity and sex as “comfort”)
Sexual violence against Native American women (Native American women could not be held to testify due because of their illegible legal status/ indiscernible personhood)
Page Act: the first restrictive federal immigration law in the US which effectively prohibited the entry of Chinese women, marking the end of open borders. Chinese women were targeted and immediately assumed as prostitutes or sex workers
Baldwin is in effect drawing a large critique of the entwinement between colonial history and sexual violence;
As an American tourist in Paris, David (whether conscious, subconscious, or unconscious) feels entitled to take advantage of his sexual relations without any consequence;
There is no emotional consequence; doesn’t regard how he leaves an existential trace; no concern on how he damages the space and place of the Other (Giovanni, Hella, Sue)
The Other usually bears the brunt of damage.
Prejudice and racism
Criminalization of queer and homosexual identities;
“Race” is always made absent but personified as a difference that is always considered immediately as a prohibition (Joey, darkness, the night/evening, the desolation of rooms);
Trans*phobia and phobic response to homosexual identities: repression of his sense of self; other characters at the Guillame’s bar; “Giovanni has one to talk to, and no one to be with, and where has found a lover who is neither man nor woman” (139); “I find my sex troubling.”
Madonna-whore complex: women are either at the extremes of being a saint or disposable sexual object inability to maintain sexual arousal or committed romantic relationship;
Fine line between freedom and policing of desire and sexual relationships
Resentment of paternal figure/ paternal relation/ masculinity
Room/ space/ architecture
Baldwin was from the outset and after the publication of Giovanni’s Room chastised; not in a position to write a novel taking place in Paris;
Space is a scapegoat in many ways (including race) Who can speak about trans-Atlantic sense of identity? Identities of difference? Who can speak about queer sexual freedom?
Baldwin could not depict a protagonist of his subject positionality: Black, young, queer, ambitious.