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James Baldwin The Fire Next Time Once you find yourself in

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Title: James Baldwin The Fire Next Time Once you find yourself in


1
James BaldwinThe Fire Next Time
  • Once you find yourself in another civilization,
    youre forced to examine your own.

2
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3
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4
Important Tidbits
  • Birth
  • Harlem, August 2, 1924 (grew up in poverty)
  • Family
  • Mother Emma Berdis Joynes
  • Adopted father David Baldwin, preacher
  • Strict, religious, troubled relationship between
    them
  • Oldest of nine children
  • Travels
  • France, Istanbul, America
  • Death
  • France, December 1, 1987 (stomach cancer)

5
Influences
  • Religion
  • Worked as a preacher (14-17 years old)
  • Those three years in the pulpit I didnt
    realize it then that is what turned me into a
    writer, really, dealing with all that anguish and
    that despair and that beauty.
  • Look for this influence in his writing (language,
    cadence, tone, etc.)
  • Literature
  • Spent days reading in Harlem Library trying to
    connect his own life to those depicted in the
    books
  • I knew I was black, of course, but I also knew I
    was smart. I didnt know how I would use my mind,
    or even if I could, but that was the only thing I
    had to use.

6
Friendships/Relationships
  • Richard Wright (author)
  • Mentor/father figure
  • Most famous novel is Native Son
  • Wright helped Baldwin secure a grant to move to
    Paris and write full time
  • Lucien Happersberger
  • Seventeen-year-old runaway
  • Baldwin fell in love with him
  • Happersberger married three years later
    devastated Baldwin
  • Maya Angelou (author)
  • Referred to Baldwin as friend and brother
  • Angelou credits Baldwin for setting the stage of
    I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

7
Work
  • Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953)
  • Autobiographical novel
  • About growing up in Harlem
  • Struggles of Black Americans profound and
    passionate unlike anything ever written before
  • Notes on a Native Son (1956)
  • Collection of essays
  • Most of the essays address ideas about race
  • Giovannis Room (1956)
  • American man living in Paris
  • Feelings and frustrations with relationships with
    other men in his life (criticized for explicit
    homoerotic content)

8
Themes
  • Search for identity
  • Wrote what and how he wanted to write despite
    criticism
  • Refused to be known as a black author or gay
    author rather, he was an American author
  • Race in America and Europe
  • One of the forerunners of the Civil Rights
    Movement
  • The Fire Next Time known as the earliest and
    primary voice of Civil Rights Movement
  • Social and political activism
  • Homosexuality
  • Baldwin was homosexual, but he wrote about
    heterosexual and bisexual characters as well
  • Universal love and brotherhood
  • Pacifist even when he was angry and disillusioned
    with the times

9
Genres
  • Prose
  • Fiction (novels and short stories)
  • Nonfiction (essays)
  • Poetry
  • Drama

10
Reading Nonfiction
  • Identify purpose and audience
  • Who is the author trying to persuade?
  • What is he trying to persuade his audience to
    think or do?
  • Identify how the author achieves his purpose
  • Persuasive appeals
  • Pathos appeal to emotion
  • Logos appeal to logic/reason
  • Ethos appeal to character/values

11
Reading Nonfiction
  • Rhetorical device
  • Technique that an author or speaker uses to
    convey a meaning with the goal of persuading him
    or her toward considering a topic from a
    different perspective
  • Regardless of the technique, the thing to wonder
    is HOW does the author achieve his/her purpose?

12
The Fire Next Time
  • Published in 1963
  • Made up of two essays
  • My Dungeon Shook
  • Down at the Cross
  • Context
  • Civil Rights Movement
  • Black Muslim Movement (aka Nation of Islam)

13
Black Muslim Movement
  • Religious organization (otherwise known as Nation
    of Islam)
  • Founded in Detroit in 1930 by Wallace D. Fard
    Muhammad
  • W. D. Fard Muhammad passed leadership to Elijah
    Muhammad
  • Goal resurrecting the spiritual, mental,
    social, and economic condition of American
    African American men and women
  • Belief that God will bring about a universal
    government of peace
  • Non-Islamic independent religion that has adopted
    Islamic terminology rather than an Islamic sect
    (differing beliefs about God, race, and prophecy)

14
Black Muslim Movement
  • Beliefs
  • No god other than Allah (who came in the form of
    W. D. Fard)
  • World society is segmented into three distinct
    categories
  • 85 of the population are the deaf, dumb and
    blind masses of the people who are easily led in
    the wrong direction and hard to lead in the right
    direction.
  • 10 rich slave-makers are said to manipulate the
    85 masses of the people through ignorance, the
    skillful use of religious doctrine and the mass
    media.
  • 5 poor righteous teachers of the people of the
    world who know the truth of the manipulation of
    the 85 masses of the people by the 10 at
    constant struggle and war with 10 to reach and
    free the minds of the masses of the people.

15
Black Muslim Movement
16
Black Muslim Movement
  • Famous names
  • Malcolm X (later converted to Sunni Islam)
  • Louis Farrakhan
  • Muhammad Ali (later converted to Sunni Islam)
  • Michael Jackson
  • Ice Cube (never a regular member)
  • Snoop Dogg

17
  • But I still believe that the unexamined life is
    not worth living and I know that self-delusion,
    in the service of no matter what small or lofty
    cause, is a price no writer can afford. His
    subject is himself and the world and it requires
    every ounce of stamina he can summon to attempt
    to look on himself and the world as they are.
  • - James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name
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