ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Raoul Peck’s 2016 film I Am Not Your Negro and Karen Thorsen’s 1989 film James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket as historicist documentaries, in the sense that they are engaged in presentist acts of recovery that are as much about their charged moments of production as they are about the now iconic figure of James Baldwin. The radically different performances of historic recovery of the same figure reveal that the two works also chronicle the transformation of historical methodology from the 1980s to the contemporary moment.
