Forty and Four Hundred Years Ago

Abstract

This article reconsiders James Baldwin’s belated pan-Africanism by way of my first encounter with his work in a class taught by Amiri Baraka. It argues that Baldwin’s returns, beginning in the late 1950s, to the national territory of the civil rights movement did not come at the cost of his growing Black internationalism. Much as Baldwin suspected he was never more at home in Harlem than when writing in Istanbul, he was perhaps most diasporan African when touring the Southern American political landscape.