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Author:   Amy J. Elias
Publisher:   Duke University Press
Imprint:   Duke University Press
Weight:   0.816kg
ISBN:  

9781478024873

ISBN 10:   1478024879
Pages:   277
Publication Date:   04 February 2025
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations  xiii Acknowledgments  xvii Introduction. Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin / Amy J. Elias  1 I. Circuits of Selfhood 1. Jimmy and Beauford: The Bond of the Unusual Door / David Leeming  39 2. The Mentor: James Baldwin, Beauford Delaney, and the Habit of Doing / Hilton Als  50 3. “You Pay for Your Life with Your Life”: James Baldwin’s Search for Jimmy Baldwin, 1969–1972 / Ed Pavlić  53 4. Beauford Delaney’s Black Queer Fatherhood / Magdalena J. Zaborowska  66 II. Synesthesia and Arts in Dialogue 5. Blue(s) as Cymbal: Beauford Delaney (Elvin Jones) James Baldwin / Fred Moten  79 6. Baldwin and Delaney: Yellows and Blues / Robert G. O’Meally  98 7. Chiaroscuro, Delaney’s Aesthetic Vision, and Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” / D. Quentin Miller  119 8. Yellow Light, Black Abstraction: Jazz, Writing, and Ethical Shattering in Baldwin’s and Delaney’s Works / Walton M. Muyumba  131 9. Baldwin/Delaney/Cazac / Nicholas Boggs  146 10. Singed Innocence: Baldwin, Delaney, and the Problematic Black Child / Robert F. Reid-Pharr  160 III. Visibility, Performance, Abstraction 11. Baldwin and Delaney: The Politics and Performance of Black Sight / Indie A. Choudhury  171 12. Shared Subjects / Rachel Cohen  187 13. Choosing Both: Abstraction and Singularity in Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin / Monika Gehlewat  197 14: “Architects of the Spirit”: Color and Intimacy in Beauford Delaney’s Post-1950 Abstractions / Abbe Schriber  208 15. Feeling Modernist: Beauford Delaney’s Self-Portrait (1944) / Levi Prombaum  224 16. “The Giacometti Effect”: Reconsidering Beauford Delaney’s 1966 Portrait Bust of James Baldwin / Stephen C. Wicks  240 IV. Continuing Influence 17. Queer Radiance: Beauford Delaney at the Bathhouse / Tyler T. Schmidt  251 18. Baldwin, Delaney, and Black Artists’ Genealogical Legacies / Shawn Anthony Christian  266 19. In a Speculative Light: The Portrait Project / Jered Sprecher  278 Bibliography  289 Contributors  309 Index Plate Credits

Reviews

“This is a vibrant, timely, and vital collection of essays that illuminate how we can read James Baldwin through Beauford Delaney’s paintings and see Delaney’s paintings through Baldwin’s writing. Placing the lives and works of these two close friends side by side tells us much about kinship, intimacy, and craft, not only in relation to Delaney and Baldwin but in African American culture more broadly.” -- Douglas Field, author of * Walking in the Dark: James Baldwin, My Father, and Me * “James Baldwin was most moving when recalling the aesthetic education he received from Beauford Delaney—who taught him both how to listen, ‘to hear [in Black music] what I had never dared or been able to hear,’ and how to see ‘and . . . trust what I saw.’ Speculative Light bears extraordinary witness to the lives of two men, devoted to their craft, moving always in the direction of wonder and uncertainty, buoyed by that loving and shared sense of attunement.” -- Stephen Best, author of * None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life *

“This is a vibrant, timely, and vital collection of essays that illuminate how we can read James Baldwin through Beauford Delaney’s paintings and how we can see Delaney’s paintings through Baldwin’s writing. Placing the lives and works of these two close friends side by side tells us much about kinship, intimacy, and craft, not only in relation to Delaney and Baldwin but in African American culture more broadly.” -- Douglas Field, author of * Walking in the Dark: James Baldwin, My Father, and Me *

Author Information

Amy J. Elias is Chancellor’s Professor and Director of the Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction and coeditor of Time: A Vocabulary of the Present and The Planetary Turn.

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