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Strangers in the Village

This essay uses Edward Said’s theory of affiliation to consider the
 relationship between James Baldwin and contemporary artists Teju Cole and Glenn
 Ligon, both of whom explicitly engage with their predecessor’s writing in
 their own work. Specifically, Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the
 Village” (1953) serves a through-line for this discussion, as it is
 invoked in Cole’s essay “Black Body” and Ligon’s
 visual series, also titled Stranger in the Village. In
 juxtaposing these three artists, I argue that they express the dialectical
 energy of affiliation by articulating ongoing concerns of race relations in
 America while distinguishing themselves from Baldwin in terms of periodization,
 medium-specificity, and their broader relationship to Western art practice. In
 their adoption of Baldwin, Cole and Ligon also imagine a way beyond his
 historical anxieties and writing-based practice, even as they continue to
 reinscribe their own work with his arguments about the African-American
 experience. This essay is an intermedial study that reads fiction, nonfiction,
 language-based conceptual art and mixed media, as well as contemporary politics
 and social media in order consider the nuances of the African-American
 experience from the postwar period to our contemporary moment. Concerns about
 visuality/visibility in the public sphere, narrative voice, and
 self-representation, as well as access to cultural artifacts and aesthetic
 engagement, all emerge in my discussion of this constellation of artists. As a
 result, this essay identifies an emblematic, though not exclusive, strand of
 African-American intellectual thinking that has never before been brought
 together. It also demonstrates the ongoing relevance of Baldwin’s
 thinking for the contemporary political scene in this country.