Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy

The Evidence of Things Not Said employs the rich essays of James Baldwin to interrogative the politics of race in American democracy. Lawrie Balfour reveals Baldwin to be a powerful political thinker whose work deserves full consideration by political theorists.Baldwin's essays challenge appeals to race-blindness and formal but empty guarantees of equality and freedom. They undermine white presumptions of racial innocence and simultaneously refute theories of persecution that define African Americans solely as innocent victims. Unsettling fixed categories, Baldwin's essays construct a theory of race consciousness that captures the effects of racial identity in everyday experience.Balfour persuasively reads Baldwin's work alongside that of W.E.B. Du Bois to accentuate how double consciousness works differently on either side of the color line. She contends that the allusiveness and incompleteness of Baldwin's essays sustains the tension between general claims about American racial historyand the singularity of individual experiences. The Evidence of Things Not Said establishes Baldwin's contributions to democratic theory and situBalfour, Lawrie is the author of 'Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy' with ISBN 9780801437519 and ISBN 0801437512.