James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination

Please join us on Tuesday, December 2nd at 7pm in the Wachenheim Trustees Room as Matt Brim and Ayana Mathis discuss the work of James Baldwin to mark the release of Brim's new book James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination. Please RSVP to Jasonbaumann@nypl.org.

The central figure in black gay literary history, James Baldwin has become a familiar touchstone for queer scholarship in the academy. Matt Brim’s James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination draws on the contributions of queer theory and black queer studies to critically engage with and complicate the project of queering Baldwin and his work. Brim argues that Baldwin animates and, in contrast, disrupts both the black gay literary tradition and the queer theoretical enterprise that have claimed him. More paradoxically, even as Baldwin’s fiction brilliantly succeeds in imagining queer intersections of race and sexuality, it simultaneously exhibits striking queer failures, whether exploiting gay love or erasing black lesbian desire. Brim thus argues that Baldwin’s work is deeply marked by ruptures of the “unqueer” into transcendent queer thought—and that readers must sustain rather than override this paradoxical dynamic within acts of queer imagination.

Matt Brim is Associate Professor of Queer Studies at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. He is author of James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination (University of Michigan Press, 2014), as well as scholarly articles and a study guide for teaching HIV/AIDS activist documentary film. His current book project is on queer pedagogy. Brim is also co-editor of the journal WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, published by the Feminist Press.

Photo : Elena Seibert

Ayana Mathis is the author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a 2013 New York Times Notable Book of the Year, an NPR Best Book of the Year, and a top selection for Oprah's Book Club 2.0.  Mathis's work has been published in The New York Times, The Financial Times, Esquire, and The New Yorker. This year she is the Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow in the Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers.