Everybody's Protest Novel: Essays

by James Baldwin

This collectible edition celebrates James Baldwin’s hundredth-year anniversary, revealing the failure of the American protest novel.Originally published in Notes of a Native Son, the essays "Autobiographical Notes," "Everybody's Protest Novel," "Many Thousands Gone," and "Carmen The Dark is Light Enough," showcase Baldwin's incisive voice as a social and literary critic.“Autobiographical Notes” outlines Baldwin’s journey as a Black writer and his hesitant transition from fiction to nonfiction. In the following essays, Baldwin explores the Black experience through the lens of popular media, critiquing the ways in which Black characters—in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Richard Wright’s novel Native Son, and the 1950s film Carmen Jones—are reduced to digestible caricatures.Everybody’s Protest Essays is the first of three special editions in the James Baldwin centennial anniversary series. Through this collection, Baldwin examines the facade of progress present in the novels of Black oppression. These essays showcase Baldwin’s profound ability to reveal the truth of the Black experience, exposing the failure of the protest novel, and the state of racial reckoning at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Anti Racist, United States

101 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 4, 2024

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Works of American writer James Arthur Baldwin, outspoken critic of racism, include Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a novel, and Notes of a Native Son (1955), a collection of essays.

James Arthur Baldwin authored plays and poems in society.

He came as the eldest of nine children; his stepfather served as a minister. At 14 years of age in 1938, Baldwin preached at the small fireside Pentecostal church in Harlem. From religion in the early 1940s, he transferred his faith to literature with the still evident impassioned cadences of black churches. From 1948, Baldwin made his home primarily in the south of France but often returned to the United States of America to lecture or to teach.

In his Giovanni's Room, a white American expatriate must come to terms with his homosexuality. In 1957, he began spending half of each year in city of New York.

James Baldwin offered a vital literary voice during the era of civil rights activism in the 1950s and 1960s.
He first partially autobiographically accounted his youth. His influential Nobody Knows My Name and The Fire Next Time informed a large white audience. Another Country talks about gay sexual tensions among intellectuals of New York. Segments of the black nationalist community savaged his gay themes. Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers stated the Baldwin displayed an "agonizing, total hatred of blacks." People produced Blues for Mister Charlie , play of Baldwin, in 1964. Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, defended Baldwin.

Going to Meet the Man and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone provided powerful descriptions. He as an openly gay man increasingly in condemned discrimination against lesbian persons.

From stomach cancer, Baldwin died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. People buried his body at the Ferncliff cemetery in Hartsdale near city of New York.

Reviews

[SaDarius · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I want to be an honest man and a good writer." Truer words have never been spoken. It's amazing to read how Baldwin deconstructs and analyzes how Black experiences and Black people are presented in what we consider classic literature and media.

[Joseph Chambers · Rating 3 out of 5]

docked a point for little women slander. otherwise: high-tier hating

[Bridget Haines-Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this up at a bookshop where it was being displayed for Black History Month. They had several selections from “Baldwin at 100”. These essays truly stand the test of time and are just as relevant today as when Baldwin first wrote them.

[Caedyn Skinner · Rating 4 out of 5]

James Baldwin I'll always love you

[Jackson Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe I should have read the books or seen the movies first

[Bond · Rating 4 out of 5]

As useful today as the 1940's. There are passages that read as if written yesterday. E.g.:
"The failure of the protest novel lies in its resection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended."
"In overlooking, denying, evading his complexity -- which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves -- we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves."
"The protest novel, so far from being disturbing, is an accepted and comforting aspect of the American scene, ramifying that framework we believe to be so necessary. Whatever unsettling questions are raised are evanescent, titillating; remote, for this has nothing to do with us, it is safely ensconced in the social arena, where, indeed, it has nothing to do with anyone, so that finally we receive a very definite thrill of virtue from the fact that we are reading such a book at all."

[Spencer Boyd · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find Baldwin's critiques here are well put, but some I take great issue with. Baldwin's claim that sociology and literature are not one and the same is ill fitting, because sociology contains literature, not because they are incomparable things. The fundamental conclusions about reductionism, that the protest novels seem to falsify life, is a bit of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It’s a pointed critique, Plato made similar ones, but these are not ones that are unavoidable or couldn’t be improved upon. Uncle Tom’s Cabin might not have won a pulitzer prize if it was published today but it did certainly give the abolitionist movement more gas.

Baldwin’s critiques certainly aren’t without merit, don’t that confused, and his prose is without equal, however, in this specific essay I fear he is being overly broad and overly critical. Other protest novels that come to mind such as Upton Sinclair’s the Jungle may be of the heavy-handed sort that Baldwin’s essays may be more relevant to, but the likes of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath should do more than enough literary justice to stand on it’s own as a novel and make it’s mark as a point of protest.

[Anu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read from the vantage point of a relatively recent immigrant to the U.S. that did not experience much of the referenced US history directly or indirectly, the book is a thought provoking and educational call to build perspective.
For instance, when I read Uncle Tom as a kid, I thought it was a great book and that Uncle Tom was a good character. When I moved to the U.S. and heard widespread criticism of it, I was keen to understand more. This NPR article does a good job of explaining it https://www.npr.org/2008/07/30/930594...
His thoughts on Uncle Tom aside, James Baldwin’s writing illuminates this multi layered perspective of how protest novels can be perceived by different people based on their lived experiences, their history and heritage. Baldwin’s own experience of being a Black man in Paris contrasted against being a Black man in America was fascinating to read.
Short but powerful book to experience the raw electricity of James Baldwin’s writing and thinking.

[Aaron Esthelm · Rating 5 out of 5]

These essays cover the concepts of perception in race in such a meaningful way. What struck me was how expertly Baldwin talked about the characatures inside the book uncle toms cabin. Highlighting that these people are not real people but have become the famous example of types of black people to exist. So that when inevitably we compare ourselves to the media we know we will find that we don't match these steryotypes and will fail in our attemtps to either avoid or fit into those frameworks. Leaving ourselves hollow and characatures ourselves. Only by shedding these models can we ever hope to become more than just what the world expects us to be.

[Catherine Fitzpatrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is the centennial of James Baldwin's birth (August 2, 1924) and I got this book at my local public library. Now I will see if I can find his novels.

This is a deceptively short book of essays. I read each one twice and would still benefit from reading them a third time. They are intricate and difficult but stay with you. Nobody writes like this any more.

I had never really thought about "Uncle Tom's Cabin" at all. In fact, I never read it in school, although my mother did and had it on our shelf. It seems a classic -- until you read Baldwin's expert critique.

All in all, Baldwin is an American hero.

[Dana · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book includes the first three essays from Notes of a Native Son, a fact I was ignorant of until after I had ordered it. It’s a compact, beautifully rendered volume. I love James Baldwin when he is being a hater. 😂 Some excellent literary critique. I’m wondering if Baldwin inspired “Not Like Us. There is a line in “Many Thousands Gone”: “Our good will, from which we expect such power to transform us, is thin, passionless, strident: its roots, examined, lead us back to our forebears, whose assumption it was that the black man, to become truly human and acceptable, must first become like us.”

[Gabby McCall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Note the fact that I've never read Uncle Tom's Cabin and it's the basis for James' critique of storytelling on being Black in America. Had I read it before attempting these essays here, I may be more favorable to them.

Overall, I was bored — dreadfully so. Lots of flourish without landing at times. I made it halfway through before I just gave up. I was falling asleep.

I plan to read the two other books I have by Baldwin—in hopes that they're more engaging. I love to hear him speak and read about him, but this just didn't do much for me.

[Alanisse · Rating 5 out of 5]

But our humanity is our burden, our life, we need not battle for it; we need only do what is infinitely more difficult, that is, accept it.

[Samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fuck yeah. I like when he tore apart Uncle Tom's Cabin. Criticism essays are the best. James Baldwin writes so smooth and poignant that I feel like I'll never be that smart.

[Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

I havent been able to lock in to reading books like this but i was so intrigued by his writing style that it went by quick! Proud for me i read in like 2 days. I can do this!! His work is rewiring my brain n challenging me in a good way. Giovannis room is next. In love w the format

[Kai Hirata · Rating 4 out of 5]

missing one star because i fear that i can’t properly give it 5 because i haven’t consumed some of the media he wrote about

[Vanessa Azpeitia · Rating 4 out of 5]

So many interesting notes on different popular media. Critiques that could still be relevant to media being produced today.

[Sequella Coleman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Baldwin’s words and voice. Essays almost stream of thought. A hundred anniversary collection worth revisiting no matter how much Baldwin you have read.