We are pleased to announce that this year's Baldwin-Dahl Lecture will be delivered by Stephen Best (UC Berkeley).
Abstract
Following years of sustained reflection on the object of Fredrick Douglass's Aunt Hester’s scream, the idea of inexpressibility or excessive noise as liberatory disruption has become a major focus in the black radical tradition, whether in the form of Nate Mackey’s “troubled eloquence,” Harmony Holiday’s “black catatonic scream,” or Fred Moten’s “mu” (“the wailing that accompanies entrance into and expulsion from sociality”). James Baldwin listened attentively for what his friend Toni Morrison called “the sound that broke the back of words,” always hearing in black song things sung which are really unsayable (“a way of keeping something alive in the self which isn’t for sale, even if your very body and the family and the bodies of your children are for sale. . . an old and deeply complex and expertly honed discourse on how to save oneself” [Ed Pavlić]). Still, Baldwin was himself exempted as a source of this phatic sound on account of his extraordinary eloquence, immaculate prose style, and sissified demeanor. “Baldwin’s Inarticulacy” returns this potential to him by attending to the “object” of his voice, specifically, the sound of his voice when he listens to himself. A sound that none of us can hear (only Baldwin can), his “voice” was a strange tool with which he grappled his entire life. It doesn’t open itself clearly to any available paradigm of analysis or measurement, or even description—it is, rather, something obvious (“in the way”) about him that can only be pointed to through solecism and, well, abuse.
