Stranger in the Village

by James Baldwin

Genres: Nonfiction, Classics

Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 1953

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

[Carolin · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I doubt that the villagers think of the devil when they face a cathedral because they have never been identified with the devil. But I must accept the status which myth, if nothing else, gives me in the West before I can hope to change the myth.”

[Ina · Rating 5 out of 5]

„This world is white no longer and it will never be white again“

Die Unterschiede zwischen Rassismus in der U.S. Amerikanischen Großstadt und dem ländlichen europäischen Dorf; Und wie beide in ihrer grundlegenden Unterschiedlichkeit sich gegenseitig ergänzen.
Fand ich persönlich sehr spannend für die Perspektive des ländlichen Europas, deren Haupt-Informationsquellen zu Rassismus sich mit der U.S. Amerikanischen Großstadt beschäftigen.

[Cas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grade: A-

I had to read this for my university degree.

[Christine Seet · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best pieces I've ever read. Will speak to anyone who has ever felt prejudice, resentment, and in turn, guilt

"I knew that they did not mean to be unkind, and I know it now; it is necessary, nevertheless, for
me to repeat this to myself each time that I walk out of the chalet."

[Tiffany · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely hated this. I absolutely loved it; regardless of whether you agree or disagree with an essay one has to give credit where credit is due. Even if you hated something if it brings out emotions good or bad it’s good.

[Saad Abdulmahmoud]

Stranger in the Village (1953/1955) van James Baldwin, een essay uit Notes of a Native Son.

Waar gaat de tekst over?
Baldwin beschrijft zijn verblijf als eerste zwarte man in een afgelegen Zwitsers bergdorp. De bewoners hebben nog nooit een zwarte persoon gezien en reageren met nieuwsgierigheid, exotisering en soms angst. Hoewel hun gedrag niet vijandig is, ervaart Baldwin hoe hij niet als mens maar als curiositeit wordt gezien .

Vanuit deze persoonlijke ervaring maakt Baldwin een veel bredere analyse van racisme, geschiedenis en macht. Hij vergelijkt Europa en Amerika en laat zien dat het Europese racisme vaak voortkomt uit onwetendheid en afstand, terwijl het Amerikaanse racisme gewelddadiger en complexer is omdat zwarte en witte mensen daar een gedeelde, pijnlijke geschiedenis hebben .

Centrale thema’s zijn:
Ontmenselijking van zwarte mensen
De invloed van geschiedenis en kolonialisme
Woede (rage) als onvermijdelijke reactie op onderdrukking
Identiteit: hoe zowel zwarte als witte identiteit gevormd wordt door racisme

Baldwin concludeert dat Amerika door deze geschiedenis niet alleen een “nieuwe zwarte man”, maar ook een “nieuwe witte man” heeft voortgebracht en dat terugkeren naar onschuld onmogelijk is .

Stranger in the Village is een krachtig en confronterend essay waarin Baldwin het persoonlijke en het politieke meesterlijk verbindt. Wat begint als een bijna anekdotische beschrijving van dorpsleven in Zwitserland groeit uit tot een diepgaande kritiek op het Westen en zijn raciale mythes.

Een van de sterkste aspecten is Baldwins analyse van geschiedenis als iets waar mensen niet buiten kunnen staan:

“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” 

Zijn observatie dat hij in het dorp niet als mens maar als wonder wordt bekeken, is zowel subtiel als pijnlijk:

“There was yet no suggestion that I was human: I was simply a living wonder.” 

Bijzonder indrukwekkend is Baldwins bespreking van woede. Hij weigert die te veroordelen of te romantiseren, maar laat zien dat woede historisch onvermijdelijk is:

“The rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless, but it is also absolutely inevitable.” 

Het essay eindigt visionair en actueel. Baldwin stelt dat de wereld niet langer wit is — en dat ook nooit meer zal zijn — en dat het onvermogen om die realiteit te erkennen gevaarlijk is:

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.” 

Dit essay is intellectueel scherp, emotioneel geladen en nog steeds zeer relevant. Baldwin schrijft helder maar compromisloos en dwingt de lezer om niet alleen racisme te zien als een probleem van “anderen”, maar als een gedeelde historische verantwoordelijkheid. Een klassieker die blijft uitdagen.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

while in a remote Swiss village, Baldwin comments on the exceptional development of African American identity, which he argues has irrevocably changed not only America and white Americans, but the whole world.
"In this long battle, a battle by no means finished, the unforeseeable effects of which will be felt by many future generations, the white man's motive was the protection of his identity; the black man was motivated by the need to establish an identity. And despite the terrorization which the Negro in America endured and endures sporadically until today, despite the cruel and totally inescapable ambivalence of his status in his country, the battle for his identity has long ago been won. He is not a visitor to the West, but a citizen there, an American; as American as the Americans who despise him, the Americans who fear him, the Americans who love him-the Americans who became less than themselves, or rose to be greater than themselves by virtue of the fact that the challenge he represented was inescapable. He is perhaps the only black man in the world whose relationship to white men is more terrible, more subtle, and more meaningful than the relationship of bitter possessed to uncertain possessor. His survival depended, and his development depends, on his ability to turn his peculiar status in the Western world to his own advantage and, it may be, to the very great advantage of that world. It remains for him to fashion out of his experience that which will give him sustenance, and a voice."

[brydzia · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The idea of white supremacy rests simply on the fact that white men are the creators of civilization (the present civilization, which is the only one that matters; all previous civilizations are simply contributions" to our own) and are therefore civilization's guardians and defenders. Thus it was impossible for Americans to accept the black man as one of themselves, for to do so was to jeopardize their status as white men. But not so to accept him was to deny his human reality, his human weight and complexity, and the strain of denying the overwhelmingly undeniable forced Americans into rationalizations so fantastic that they approached the pathological.”

“It is only now beginning to be borne in on us-very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against our will--that this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless. For it protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of reality. People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster. ”

[Greg S · Rating 3 out of 5]

The white man takes the astonishment as tribute, for he arrives to conquer and to convert the natives, whose inferiority in relation to himself is not even to be questioned; whereas I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose culture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me, people who have cost me more in anguish and rage than they will ever know, who yet do not even know of my existence.

……….

What one’s imagination makes of other people is dictated, of course, by the laws of one’s own personality and it is one of the ironies of black-white relations that, by means of what the white man imagines the black man to be, the black man is enabled to know who the white man is.

[Leserlich · Rating 4 out of 5]

I guess one has to get acquainted with James Baldwin these days. This short little essay was my entry point, also because I just returned from a vacation in Switzerland, where Baldwin wrote this essay in a tiny little village. Starting point is that he realized that none of the inhabitants have probably seen a black person before. He relates that to how white Americans must have felt, when they first came to that continent and saw such strangers. They come from a world without blacks, but they can never go back there, concludes Baldwin. A nice short and thought-provoking read.

[Axel Koch · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic Baldwin essay that met me with quite the gobsmack - not because the mechanisms of unconscious racism were entirely new to me, but because it forced me to realise that my own upbringing (Alpine, Catholic, provincial, unwittingly privileged, and teeming with well-intentioned bigotry) was so much closer to that of the Swiss mountain community ogling Baldwin upon his arrival than I would have liked to admit even to myself.

[Roxy Marcus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd never read any James Baldwin and immediately I really like his writing style.

[allie · Rating 3 out of 5]

read as apart of my college lit fiction class

this was kinda boring, ngl
lots of black vs whites, but in a more innocent way than we americans are used to

[Eszter Vida · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first time reading any Baldwin and I really engaged with his account on the mountain and his commentary on this self-aggrandised society of whiteness.

[R-mig · Rating 5 out of 5]

"This world is white no more, and it will never be white again."

This is the last sentence of the essay. Goes to show you what a powerful read it is.

[Joe Lawrence]

Baldwin's words are like winding mountain roads in this text. I feel transported to a cold, bleak mountain town with friendly yet naive people. I won't look on European Cathedrals the same again.