Rereading Baldwin’s nonfiction in the context of midcentury Black Atlantic thought
 
James Baldwin’s nonfiction offers some of the most important and challenging thinking on the experience of race, history, and memory in the Black Atlantic world. Yet much of the scholarly literature on Baldwin’s writing reads his work from inside the sociocultural context of the United States, alongside key interlocutors like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Lorraine Hansberry. So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic shifts the critical frame, examining Baldwin’s work as part of a midcentury moment across the wider Atlantic world and tying his reflections to those of thinkers in the Caribbean and Africa to underscore the widening sense, as well as the particularity, of his critical claims. Who is Baldwin to the Atlantic world? And who, then, is Baldwin to the United States? John E. Drabinski recasts Baldwin as a Black Atlantic writer whose unique qualities as a thinker are enhanced by their similarities and differences with fellow writers of liberation in the global Black world.

JOHN E. DRABINSKI is a professor in the Departments of African American and Africana Studies and English at the University of Maryland. His books include Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss.

“Reading So Unimaginable a Price, I felt I was in the hands of a meticulous and patient guide who shepherded me through difficult questions and complex texts. Drabinski’s scholarship on Black Atlantic theory is a necessary and welcome addition to studies on James Baldwin.” —Mari N. Crabtree, Emerson College

“The distinctness of James Baldwin’s essays are to be found in its incandescent audibility. In his essays one can hear Baldwin wrestle with his thoughts; one can see the iridescence of his mind at work. John Drabinski’s So Unimaginable a Price performs a double act of virtuosity. Drabinski brings to us the sound of Baldwin’s unique voice by producing piercing insight into how it is that Baldwin continues to shine the truest light on that difficult human condition that is being a black American.” —Grant Aubrey Farred, Cornell University
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