AUP Common Read: Yannick M Blec on James Baldwin

To round off this semester’s Common Read activity, we are delighted to invite the AUP community to a James Baldwin workshop with Baldwin’s most recent French biographer, Yannick M. Blec.
Yannick will be leading attendees through a consideration of Baldwin’s life and work, focusing particularly on what he describes as the “paradoxes of James Baldwin's First-Person Narratives”.

This will be another excellent opportunity for students, faculty and staff to come together to reflect and think about Baldwin’s work and how it resonates with our current moment.


A Life of His Own? And Yet: The Paradoxes of James Baldwin's First-Person Narratives
Most of James Baldwin’s interviews, essays, and many of his novels and short stories use a first-person voice that make his narratives deeply personal. The intimacy that stems from such storytelling techniques comes from the supposed proximity of the narrator whom we are so much more inclined to listen to, given the subjective aspects of the discourse they give. This is true of the essays “Equal in Paris,” and “Stranger in the Village.” We can find it too in the speech Baldwin made at Cambridge University in 1965, “The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro”. It is also Tish’s or David’s words when we read the novels If Beale Street Could Talk or Giovanni’s Room.

Although this first-person narrative technique imposes a form of solipsism or self-centeredness, these individual experiences resonate with(-in) the reader/listener. In his texts, speeches, and interviews, the “I” used by Baldwin represents a universal concept, one that plays on our heartstrings, whatever our situation in Western society. Accordingly, in this work, I will consider the paradoxes of this “I” since it does not just concern one but many. There is a relevance in Baldwin’s texts that is still felt today, even though they were written in the 1950s or up to the end of the 1980s. Indeed, as he refused to be categorized by labels, his philosophy has a universal significance, especially for people from the margins. It also helps those in the “mainstream” to be better allies to those minorities.

About Yannick M Blec
Dr. Yannick M. Blec is the author of a recent French biography of James Baldwin (James Baldwin, Folio Biographie, 2024). The other aspects of his research concern the construction of subaltern identities as his work focuses on African American identities, and more specifically on the intersection of Black LGBTQ+ masculinities in US inner cities. These are examined through popular culture elements, particularly hip-hop culture with rap lyrics, music, rhythms, fashion, performances, and videos. In addition to representations, the analyses highlight the ways these representations are received by various Black male audiences/viewers. They also try to determine the extent to which Black masculinities are transformed by hip hop images as far as Black (queer) men are concerned, all in relation the social, political, and economic US environment at large and within the more marginal Black community neighborhoods.