ABSTRACT

In this chapter, the author considers James Baldwin’s long and complicated relationship with William Shakespeare over the course of several moments in his decades-long career. Baldwin’s perceptions of himself as an outsider and a culturally marginal figure allow him to access truths about race and identity that the white majority culture often cannot perceive. The author examines the dynamics of his appropriative relationship with Shakespeare’s work and cultural legacy with an eye toward what Baldwin’s race conscious epistemology has to reveal about the poet’s broader import and racial signification within twentieth-century American culture and beyond. In an essay written in 1952, just before the publication of his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin describes his frustration, as a young African American writer, at being relegated by editors to assignments reviewing books about American race relations. Baldwin’s use of The Tempest to think through the consequences of Western colonialism is far from unprecedented.