ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how James Baldwin correlates extroversion with self-reflection, arguing that it is only through robust, uninhibited dialogue with others that we come to know ourselves. Reflecting Habermas’ theory of communicative action, he contends that racial bias and the fear that informs it persist because we avoid the “disagreeable mirror” raised by honest arguments with strangers and intimates alike. This chapter reads Baldwin’s fiction and nonfiction to show how he imaginatively inhabits and speaks from a range of character and subject positions, highlighting the historical singularity of the African American subject, even as he demands that black subjectivity gets to be as varied as any other subjectivity. At once acknowledging and testing the limits of affiliation, his short stories dramatize the fact that dialogue, arguments, and even failed conversations preserve vital boundaries between self and other, while simultaneously earning the rewards of sociality like love or political solidarity.
