Sexuality and statelessness: Queer migrations and national identity in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room

ABSTRACT

This article reads James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room as a queer diasporic novel. Drawing on feminist work on diaspora and empire, it argues that Baldwin’s exploration of the damaging capacity of homophobia demonstrates its central role in maintaining white supremacy and supporting US nation-building and French imperialism. The narrative unreliability of the protagonist, David, manifests the internal contradictions of the larger state project which renders same-sex desire as both central to the national order and unspeakable within the framework of white imperial masculinity. Baldwin thus shows the privileged status of white masculinity to be impossible without the ubiquity of racialized queer desire as its constitutive Other. By considering Giovanni’s Room as a novel about queer diasporic consciousness, this article relocates Baldwin within an internationalist framework, acknowledges the urgent global political debates that animated his writing and contextualized the novel’s publication, and understands sexuality and race beyond the limits of the national.

KEYWORDS:

• Masculinity
• white supremacy
• cold war imperialism
• James Baldwin
• queer diasporic consciousness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Richard Wright, an African American writer 16 years Baldwin’s senior,was a major figure in world literature, known for his 1938 collection of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945). See Field (2013).

2. David’s movement returns him to the land of his imperial European ancestors, as prefigured in the opening scene. His flight reads as a backwards movement: both a return to the past and a queer undoing of the principles upon which the imperial state rests.

3. Citizenship tends to be defined negatively, through exclusion rather than inclusion. For a more thorough discussion of this dynamic in relation to the regulation of sexuality, see Evans (1993).

4. Sedgwick (1990, 42) argues persuasively that all “major institutionalized discourse(s)” in the US participate in the “programmatic undertaking” to “prevent the development of gay people”.

5. Regarding the rendering of homosexuality as national threat and psychopathology, see Corber (1997), Cuordileonne (2005) and Dudziak (2000).

6. Giovanni is established as a notable counterpart to David; he has very little money and no legal right to residency in France, and so lives in a state of precarity quite distinct from David’s, whose version of “poverty” consists of waiting for his father to send money from the US. That Giovanni does not have recourse to the white patriarchal privilege that insulates David suggests a keen attention to the complex class politics in Italy after World War II. Indeed, Giovanni’s poverty might be linked to the disastrous economic situation that followed fascist Italy’s own imperial ambitions, as well as to the specific terms of the Marshall Plan, in which US aid was oriented towards capital growth, further isolating poor rural families like Giovanni’s.

7. French slang for a gay man, based on a colloquialism for a chatty, gossipy woman.

8. Literally, “peculiar tastes”, referring to men who have a sexual preference for other men.

9. Baldwin’s articulation of the raciality of queer sex as constitutive of white heteropatriarchy is akin to Sedgwick’s (1985) illumination of how homosocial relations between men manage power in a patriarchal order through homophobia.

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Meg Wesling

Meg Wesling is associate professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego, and teaches and publishes in American literatures, feminist theory, postcolonial criticism and queer theory. Her monograph Empire’s Proxy: American Literature and US Imperialism in the Philippines was published by NYU Press in 2011.