Jimmy's Faith: James Baldwin, Disidentification, and the Queer Possibilities of Black Religion

Jimmy’s Faith

JAMES BALDWIN, DISIDENTIFICATION, AND THE QUEER POSSIBILITIES OF BLACK RELIGION

Christopher W. Hunt

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK 2025

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Contents

PREFACE

Introduction

1Jimmy’s Queer Threshing-Floor: Transformation and the Role of Disidentification in Baldwin’s Fiction

2Jimmy’s Communion: Race, Peoplehood, and the Tone of (Black) Community

3Jimmy’s Eschaton: Hope in the New Jerusalem

4Jimmy’s Man: The Problem of Sexism in Baldwin’s Literature

5Jimmy’s (A)Theology: Toward a Black Agnostic Mysticism

Coda

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Preface

We live in a time in which everyone seems to have a relationship with Jimmy. It may seem odd, and perhaps impertinent, to deploy a name used by his closest friends and family, yet there seems to be that level of intimacy among those who have reclaimed Jimmy as their own—their teacher, prophet, inspiration, and friend. The man who was panned by critics (literary and political, black as well as white) in the late ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s as being out of touch and past his prime, has now returned to the public arena in such a way that not a day goes by that his voice does not ring out on a social media platform, his name is not invoked on a news program, or a news piece (academic or popular) does not drop with a presumably new take on his life and work. On one level, this Baldwin resurgence should be praised. As David Baldwin recounted in the 1990 documentary James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket, Jimmy wanted to be found again, to prove himself useful, long after he passed. David Baldwin remembers his brother as saying:

I pray I’ve done my work so, that when I’ve gone from here … through the wreckage and rumble … when someone finds themself digging through the ruins … I pray that somewhere in that wreckage they’ll find me. Somewhere in that wreckage, that they can use something that I left behind. And if I’ve done that, then I’ve accomplished something in life.¹

One need not belabor the point that we live in a time of turmoil and wreckage, one in which we are struggling to find, and sustain, life in the ruins left by capitalism, anti-blackness, and cisheteronormativity. And in the midst of that devastation, Jimmy’s speaking again, calling us to follow his gospel.²

But we must acknowledge that we lost something with the advent of the soundbite Jimmy, the Jimmy of popular culture. Take for instance, the 2016 release of the documentary I am Not Your Negro. After walking out of my first viewing, although filled with joy to see my hero on the big screen, being viewed by some for the first time, I knew that something was amiss; something of Jimmy had been erased in the film. Soon after my viewing, a number of excellent articles, reviews, and reflections were written that gave voice to my discomfort,³ and my suspicions were confirmed sometime later as I participated in a panel discussion on the film, organized by a local Black Lives Matter organization in central Indiana. After I offered my comments on the problematic erasure of Baldwin’s queerness/sexuality in the film, a man stood up—a professor at a prestigious university in the Midwest—and said something along the lines of, Listen, we just need to bracket the sexuality stuff. We need to focus on the main thing, which was Baldwin’s critique of race. Yes, he was gay, but that wasn’t as important as his critique of white supremacy. Following this professor’s comment, a black woman raised her hand and offered, I agree, let’s stick to the point. My child isn’t menaced because of his sexuality, but because of his race. There is much I could say about these comments, but what is most important for our purposes here is that these statements made clear that if we are going to claim a closeness with Jimmy, if we are going to profess him as our teacher, prophet, and friend, we cannot have a piecemeal Jimmy. We cannot have a Jimmy in whom we only engage those parts that we find palatable, sexy, and easily digestible. We need Jimmy in his complexity, or what Douglas Field calls the shifting and developing James Baldwins.⁴ We need a Jimmy who never discussed race in the United States without also pointing to the ways in which white supremacy is bolstered by an intersecting sexual, gender, and religious ideology that can only be deconstructed and combated together. This book, which engages Jimmy’s faith specifically, and his engagement of religion broadly, will demonstrate that to discuss Jimmy’s faith is also to discuss the theological regime which contributed to the birth of whiteness; to discuss Jimmy’s faith is to discuss Western Christianity’s attempt to police and control the sexual body through the creation and (re)entrenchment of heteronormativity; to discuss Jimmy’s faith and religion is to understand the sacrament that is (queer) sexuality; to discuss Jimmy’s faith is to understand Baldwin’s sociopolitical vision for a society freed from the shackles of anti-blackness and cisheteronormativity—a reality he calls the New Jerusalem.⁵ This book is one small, and inadequate, attempt to see Jimmy in his complexity, to find Jimmy in the wreckage.

Introduction

¹

As Douglas Field notes in his 2015 work, All Those Strangers: The Art and Lives of James Baldwin, examinations of Baldwin’s relationship to religion are a glaring absence in Baldwin scholarship, with only a handful of full-length monographs being dedicated to the topic.² This book attempts to add to the growing body of work on Baldwin’s deeply complex relationship to black religion. Why did Baldwin, a man who spoke often of having left the church as a teenager, seem unable to leave the symbols and language, the church-talk and indeed the god-talk,³ of Christianity behind? Clarence Hardy is correct in pointing out that, unbeknownst to many of those who have only been exposed to the Baldwin of popular culture, the literature of James Baldwin, in its entirety, remains captive to … [the] rhythms, language, and themes of black religious expression in the United States—particularly black Christianity.⁴ Jimmy’s Faith will explore this primary question: What is Baldwin doing with, and through, his literary deployment of religious language and symbols?

Jimmy’s Faith is by no means the first text to raise this question, as the scholarship of Clarence Hardy, Douglas Field, Josiah Ulysses Young, Michael Lynch, and El Kornegay, among others, can attest. However, this study demonstrates that in Baldwin’s literature one does not find either a rejection (counteridentification) or an embrace (identification) of Christianity, but rather a strategic disidentification—disidentification in the manner articulated by queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz.⁵ According to Muñoz, disidentification works on, with, and against a cultural form,⁶ and is a means of transfiguring or recycling a phenomenon which is typically hostile to the queer person, recreating it as a space of queer imagination, survival, and at times empowerment.⁷ In my reading, Baldwin disidentifies with Christian theology, for although he publicly rejects the faith of his upbringing, he continues to speak through the framework of black church music, language, and symbols in order to challenge and restructure their meaning in articulating his own, unique black religious vision, a vision rooted in the possibility that individual humans, and the culture at large, can be radically transformed.

A (Queer) Theory of Disidentification

In order to offer a more robust understanding of disidentification as it will be utilized in this project, we turn now to the queer of color critique⁸ of theorist José Esteban Muñoz. Muñoz builds his distinct understanding of disidentification through a complex blending of various theories including, but not limited to, Michel Pêcheux’s theory of disidentification which is inspired by the Marxist analysis of Louis Althusser,⁹ and the political strategy of disidentification found in the work of radical feminists of color, particularly Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s work This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color.¹⁰ In essence, these diverse theories coalesce in offering a hermeneutic of disidentification which allows one to explore how the queer person/community takes a moment, object, or subject that is not culturally coded to ‘connect’ with the disidentifying subject, and remakes that social phenomenon in a way that invest[s] it with new life.¹¹ According to Muñoz:

Disidentification is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. Thus, disidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture.¹²

In other words, disidentification is the means through which marginalized subjects, which for Muñoz are those queer persons who exist at the intersections of class, gender, sexual, and racial oppression, strategically utilize hostile cultural phenomena in a fashion that acknowledges their oppressive / exclusionary machinations, while also reworking and reimagining them in such a way as to create the possibility for a disempowered politics.

Therefore, disidentification is a hermeneutic, a process of production, and a mode of performance.¹³ As a hermeneutic, disidentification presupposes the ability to read cultural phenomena in way that excavates their underlying meanings. In addition, as a form of production, disidentification serves as a means of queer worldmaking.¹⁴ Muñoz, in his opening reflection on the legacy of performance artist Jack Smith, posits: Smith once claimed that important acting did not change the actor but instead transformed the world. Smith made worlds during his performances; he recycled schlock culture and remade it as a queer world.¹⁵ This quote not only speaks to the productive capacities of disidentification, but also to its performative aspects, for Muñoz’s text seeks to theorize disidentification as a modality of performance, exploring how queer performance artists create their own distinct queer worlds.¹⁶

However, disidentification is not limited to performance art, and Muñoz claims that one of the most compelling examples of the process and effects that I discuss here as disidentification, is found in the literature of James Baldwin.¹⁷ Muñoz’s own reading of Baldwin’s practice of disidentification, which served as a direct inspiration for my own reading of Baldwin, is helpful in offering a concrete example of how Muñoz’s theory functions. He explores one passage from The Devil Finds Work as an example of Baldwin’s disidentifying practice. In this passage, Baldwin recounts his father’s consistent claim that Baldwin was the ugliest boy he had ever seen, an insult based in the presumed ugliness of Baldwin’s, and his mother’s, frog-eyes.¹⁸ However, this common trope of Baldwin’s father is troubled the first time a young James Baldwin sees the actor, Bette Davis. Baldwin states:

So, here, now, was Bette Davis, on that Saturday afternoon, in close-up, over a champagne glass, pop-eyes popping. I was astounded. I had caught my father, not in a lie, but in an infirmity. For, here, before me, after all, was a movie star: white: and if she was white and a movie star, she was rich: and she was ugly. … Out of bewilderment, out of loyalty to my mother, probably, and also because I sensed something menacing and unhealthy (for me, certainly) in the face on the screen, I gave Davis’s skin the dead-white greenish cast of something crawling from under a rock, but I was held, just the same, by the tense intelligence of the forehead, the disaster of the lips: and when she moved, she moved just like a nigger.¹⁹

According to Muñoz, Baldwin found something both liberatory and horrible in the image of Davis on the big screen.²⁰ For here was a rich and white movie star, a woman of untold cultural and financial capital, who had the same ugly frog-eyes as Baldwin, the very object of his father’s scorn. Baldwin troubles his father’s claim that he is in fact ugly by strategically seeing himself in the actress, an actress that not only bore Baldwin’s eyes, but moved like a nigger. However, Davis cannot serve as a definitive source of identification for Baldwin, for her whiteness signifies a danger, something menacing and unhealthy.²¹ Therefore, Baldwin cannot identify with Davis, nor does he choose to counter-identify with her, but he strategically disidentifies with Davis in an attempt to revalue his own appearance. Muñoz posits:

The example of Baldwin’s relationship with Davis is a disidentification insofar as the African-American writer transforms the raw material of identification (the linear match that leads toward interpellation) while simultaneously positioning himself within and outside the image of the movie star. For Baldwin, disidentification is more than simply an interpretive turn or a psychic maneuver; it is, most crucially, a survival strategy.²²

This book builds on, yet moves beyond, Muñoz’s engagement of Baldwin and disidentification. I will demonstrate that Baldwin’s unique disidentificatory practice is far more extensive than this brief reflection on the appearance of a Hollywood actor, for disidentification became the primary means through which Baldwin engaged the Christian tradition throughout his adult life. What will be shown is that Baldwin places himself within and outside of Christian language and symbols.²³ For despite Christianity’s perceived failures, Baldwin’s literary and political vision remains inundated with the symbols of black Christian faith, particularly that of the sanctified / Pentecostal tradition.²⁴ Rather than rejecting the symbols of the Pentecostal church in a totalizing manner, Baldwin queers them, disidentifying with and transfiguring their meaning so as to signify the flourishing of life for the very people those symbols were once used to exclude.²⁵ Baldwin, although he left the church as a teenager, continues to find its language and symbols efficacious, not only in leveling his devasting critique of the anti-black, anti-sex regime of white (Christian) supremacy, but he also utilizes those same symbols in his own attempt at imagining and building a new world.²⁶

Autobiography as Rehearsal for Fiction

²⁷

In addition to the method of disidentification, I will also utilize a biographically informed reading strategy in exploring both Baldwin’s nonfiction and fiction. This strategy seeks to avoid the temptation of drawing what Baldwin calls one-on-one relationships between himself and his literary creations,²⁸ while also acknowledging that Baldwin’s fiction and its characters are a profound source for understanding Baldwin’s relationship to Christianity. Once again, the work of José Esteban Muñoz proves invaluable in articulating this project’s reading strategy.

Muñoz claims that Baldwin not only utilizes a praxis of disidentification in his fiction and nonfiction writings, but that he also disidentifies with the genre of fiction itself, understanding nonfiction, or, more nearly, autobiography, [as] a rehearsal for fiction.²⁹ Muñoz roots this claim in the fact that Baldwin understood his nonfiction / autobiographical essay, The Devil Finds Work as a prelude to what would be expressed in his final novel Just Above My Head.³⁰ Muñoz highlights this passage from David Leeming’s biography of Baldwin to exhibit the autobiographical connection between The Devil Finds Work and Just Above My Head. Leeming explains:

He told Mary Blume that the book [The Devil Finds Work] demanded a certain confession of myself, a confession of his loneliness as a celebrity left behind by assassinated comrades, a confession of compassion and hope even as he was being criticized for being passé, a confession of his fascination with the American fantasy, epitomized by Hollywood, even as he condemned it. It was a rehearsal for something I’ll deal with later. That something, Just Above My Head, would be the major work of his later years.³¹

Therefore, Baldwin understood The Devil Finds Work as space in which to express a personal confession, which would be more fully fleshed out in his last work of fiction Just Above My Head. This language of confession is important, as will be shown in Chapter 1, for it signifies the act of revealing a truth about one’s own life. Thus, confession presumes the autobiographical, the revelation of who one is.

Muñoz also claims that Baldwin’s fiction did not indulge the project of camouflaging an authorial surrogate. Instead, he produced a fiction that abounded with stand-ins.³² He goes on to argue:

With this posited, we begin to glimpse an understanding of fiction as a technology of the self. This self is a disidentificatory self whose relation to the social is not overdetermined by universalizing rhetorics of selfhood. The real self who comes into being through fiction is not the self who produces fiction, but is instead produced by fiction. Binaries finally begin to falter and fiction becomes the real; which is to say that the truth effect of ideological grids is broken down through Baldwin’s disidentification with the notion of fiction—and it does not stop here: fiction then becomes a contested field of self-production.³³

In other words, Muñoz is arguing that Baldwin queers and troubles the line between autobiography and fiction, between the authorial real self and the real self that is constructed through fiction. Therefore, in order to understand Baldwin’s relationship to religious rhetoric and symbols, we must engage both Baldwins, the Baldwin producing works of literature and the Baldwin being produced through his literary output.

Baldwin biographer David Leeming argues that Baldwin’s semiautobiographical approach to his literature was "his method since Go Tell It on the Mountain."³⁴ This is confirmed by Baldwin himself in a 1976 interview with Jewell Handy Gresham. In response to the question Did you write that out of personal experience?, Baldwin explains:

That’s a very good question. You’re talking about Go Tell it On the Mountain, my first novel, which concerns itself with John, his father and mother and the church people. The point of the book, in a way, is what experiences shaped his aunt, his father, his mother. All of these lives were shaping John’s life. His choices are defined by things that have happened to other people, not him. Not yet. In short he’s walking into his ancestors’ lives and experiences. Obviously at some point in my life that was my situation. And in order for me to assess and surmount it, I had to face it. That’s why you write any book, in a sense, to clarify something. Not merely for yourself. What I have to assume is that if it happened to me it happened to someone else. You have to trust your own experience, which is all that connects you to anyone else.³⁵

This relationship of autobiography to fiction, which Baldwin highlights above, offers a reading strategy through which I will engage Baldwin’s corpus and his disidentification with religious symbols. As both Muñoz and Baldwin make clear, Baldwin’s sense of self can be gleaned from his fiction, and I extend this idea in saying that Baldwin’s sense of self in relation to religion can be gleaned from his fiction. Baldwin is both producing and being produced by his fiction, as he writes to clarify things that remain unsettled in his personal life. With this in mind, one could argue that Baldwin likewise continues to engage and reimagine religious symbols out of an attempt to clarify religion’s meaning both for himself and others.³⁶ Thus, Baldwin’s fiction and nonfiction should be read in tandem, with one genre being used to illuminate the other, both shedding light on Baldwin’s distinct religious vision.

James Baldwin’s Religion

In engaging the question of religion in relation to Baldwin’s literature, it is important to be explicit about the disciplinary location of this text, which sits at the intersections of black studies, black religious studies, and black theological discourses. As for the meaning of black religion as I understand it, I borrow from, and build on, the scholarship of Anthony Pinn. According to Pinn, black religions in the United States, whether Christian, Muslim, or humanist, were and continue to be, birthed out of a shared historical struggle against white supremacy, and are at their core, reflective of the human quest for complex subjectivity.³⁷ As he puts it:

This quest means a desired movement from being corporeal object controlled by oppressive and essentializing forces to becoming a complex conveyor of cultural meaning, with a complex and creative identity.… This subjectivity is understood as complex in that it seeks to hold in tension many ontological possibilities, a way of existing in numerous spaces of identification as opposed to reified notions of identity that mark dehumanization.³⁸

In other words, diasporic black persons have been subjected to a process of thingafication,³⁹ or reification, as varying socio-political, economic, linguistic, and theological structures sought to (re)create and "fix"⁴⁰ black people in an image created by white supremacy, with blackness conceived as the embodiment of subhumanity, and to use more theological language, sin. It is within this existential situation that black religion arises, which is the creative struggle in history for increased agency, for a fullness of life.⁴¹

Pinn argues that black Christian appeals to being made in the image of God and the Nation of Islam’s claims for the black person as ‘god’ are attempts at building a sense of fullness and meaning in the world.⁴² He goes so far as to call this experience, this desire for complex subjectivity, a mystical experience,⁴³ reflective of that deeper, elemental impulse, an inner stirring, that informs and shapes religion as practice and historical structure.⁴⁴ In essence, Pinn understands religious experience, this quest for complex subjectivity, as an answer to the crisis of identity that constitutes the dilemma of ultimacy and meaning.⁴⁵ I argue that this framework of complex subjectivity provides a helpful lens through which to discuss Baldwin’s relationship to black religion.

However, we must be careful in utilizing the language of subjectivity, for I am not signifying what scholar Ashon Crawley calls the liberal logics of subjectivity,⁴⁶or what he names elsewhere as that perfectable and enclosed subject.⁴⁷ For he is correct, as articulated in his work Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, in a section on Immanuel Kant, that the subject/subjectivity is rooted in the aversion to, and the fleeing of, the social.⁴⁸ He states, "Kant’s theory of Enlightenment was founded upon the escape from sociality and sociability.… The scholar, the philosopher, the subject would emerge when that individual thinks for himself without the aid of others."⁴⁹ Black religion, however, is always and already about a movement into/toward the social, as will be shown in Chapter 5. Therefore, it would be more appropriate to speak of complex asubjectivity, which Crawley defines as "the subjectivity in the commons, an asubjectivity that is not about the enclosed self but the open, vulnerable, available, enfleshed organism."⁵⁰

According to Baldwin, the human is resolutely indefinable [and] unpredictable. He adds:

In overlooking, denying, evading his complexity—which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves—we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves.⁵¹

Therefore, in centering the complexity of the human (and we will see in Chapter 4 that Baldwin’s understanding of the human needs to be thoroughly interrogated), persons can find the power to free themselves from the myopic visions and identities which are placed upon them. Baldwin then argues that this power of revelation, the power to show humanity who it truly is as complex (a)subjects, is the business of the novelist, and one could argue the artist in general.⁵² Utilizing the framework of Pinn, Baldwin’s work and public witness should be conceived as a religious quest, for he is seeking to create a world in which humans are free from the confines of fixed identity constructs

It is also important to note that in examining Baldwin’s literature as articulating a distinct religious critique and vision, I will be in conversation with black theological discourses. However, I am using theology in a very specific, and indeed unconventional way. I return again to Anthony Pinn and his work Varieties of African American Religious Experience:

… theology is deliberate or self-conscious human construction focused upon uncovering and exploring the meaning and structures of religious experience within the larger body of cultural production.… Conceived in this way, African American theology’s only obligation, then, is the uncovering of meaning and providing of responses to the questions of life that explain experience, assess existing symbols and categories, and allow for healthy existence.⁵³

In other words, Pinn understands theology as a means for exploring the meaning and structures, the symbols and categories, of varying quests for complex subjectivity—i.e., various expressions of religion.⁵⁴ Therefore, inspired by Pinn’s distinct take on theology, this project is not a constructive theology, nor is it comparative⁵⁵ as is Pinn’s in Varieties. It is, in fact, exploring Baldwin’s theological responses to the questions of life. This is not god-talk proper, and it will be shown later that theology as an academic and often confessional enterprise cannot adequately hold Baldwin, but this book moves through and is influenced by theological discourse in seeking to explicate the meaning and liberating potential of Baldwin’s vision for those on the margins of, or outside of, traditional religious spaces, whether due to transgressive religious identities (black skeptics, agnostics, humanists, or nontheists), or because of nonnormative sexual or gender identities and expressions (i.e., queer and trans persons). However, this book’s relationship to theology remains intentionally unsettled, and this work must examine Baldwin and black religion with and, to borrow Crawley’s phrase, "against theology."⁵⁶

An (A)theological Paradigm

As previously stated, this book stands at the intersection of black theological and black religious studies discourses, deploying a hermeneutic stemming out of queer theory. In a similar fashion to works written in the traditions of black and womanist theologies and black religious studies, I, like Baldwin, am concerned with exploring black life as source material for teasing out black religions’ role in bolstering or hindering the cause of black liberation and survival in an anti-black world. However, Baldwin’s work, and praxis of disidentification, also provides an opportunity for engaging black theological and religious studies in a queer fashion, transgressing the bounds of what Ashon Crawley, in his work Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, calls categorical distinction that stalks under the surface of theology as a discourse.⁵⁷

Teasing out the meaning of this phrase, Crawley raises the question, "what does it mean—to riff on, and thus off, Immanuel Kant—to orient oneself in thinking … theologically and philosophically?"⁵⁸ In answering this question, Crawley claims that these two modes of inquiry, theology and philosophy, are the product of an epistemological striving for pure thought / pure difference that arose with modernity.⁵⁹ Crawley states:

What does it mean to place oneself into a conceptual zone and category of distinction and think from such a place? How does thought emerge from that which has been deemed, a priori, a categorically distinct modality of thought? And just what desires for purity under-gird such a drive toward thinking from the categorically distinct zone? Air, the impure admixture, had to be let out of thought, had to be evacuated.… The possibility for distinction that is categorical, that is in the end pure, is the problem of Enlightenment thought. Pure difference. This is what theological and philosophical thought attempt to achieve.⁶⁰

In other words, Crawley is pointing out that the Enlightenment project was/is an attempt to organize knowledge,⁶¹ generating categorical distinction / pure difference⁶² through the exclusion of that which was/is deemed other, or "other thought."⁶³ Therefore, this Enlightenment drive to categorize, to create zones