Love as resistance

A brief analysis of James Baldwin’s If Beale street could talk

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15448/1984-4301.2022.1.40874

Keywords:

James Baldwin, Love, Racism, African American Literature

Abstract

James Baldwin (1924-1987) is a unique name not only in the literary realm, but in the civil rights activist universe. When published in 1974, Beale Street spoke generated controversial criticism of Baldwin, a novel that deals with the drama of a young African American couple. At the age of fifty, despite the incessant activism and respectable intellectual production, he insisted on fit it into a specific genre, style, theme. However, Baldwin proved to be free and put himself where he intended to be any kind of injustice, regardless of criticism or doctrine. And if there is a theme to be defended, this is love as resistance to social conventions. The objective of this work is to identify the fictional strategies in the present narrative that establish dialogues with the thinking of James Baldwin defended in the essays contained in Fire next time (1963) and Nobody no name (1961).

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Author Biography

Valdomiro Santos Martins, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil.

Mestre em Letras – Escrita criativa, pelo Programa de pós-graduação em Letras – da Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), em Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil. Doutorando em Letras, pelo Programa de pós-graduação em Letras – Pontifícia da mesma instituição – área de concentração em Escrita Criativa, linha de pesquisa em leitura, crítica e sistema literário, em Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil.

References

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MORRISON, Toni. As origens dos outros: seis ensaios sobre racismo e literatura. Tradução de Fernanda Abreu. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2016.

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Published

2022-10-20

How to Cite

Martins, V. S. (2022). Love as resistance: A brief analysis of James Baldwin’s If Beale street could talk. Letrônica, 15(1), e40874. https://doi.org/10.15448/1984-4301.2022.1.40874

Issue

Vol. 15 No. 1 (2022): Single volume

Section

James Baldwin, in the age of black lives matter

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