Maurice Wallace

Associate Professor of English & African & African American Studies

The talk is a religo-political meditation on James Baldwin life and work between 1957 and 1970.  More specifically, it will consider Baldwin's travels to Israel, Istanbul, Ghana and the American South as so many pilgrimages and wrestle with the  ambivalent meaningfulness of the pilgrimage for modern religious subjects.

About the Speaker

A 1995 Duke PhD, Maurice Wallace has also taught at in the departments of English and African and Afro-American Studies at Yale University. Author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775-1995, his recent teachings and writings have turned to literature and visual culture, with particular and sustained emphases on autobiography, realism, photographic representation, and the visual technologies of race, gender, and difference. Presently, he is at work on a critical biography of James Baldwin between 1960 and 1970 entitled Hostile Witness: James Baldwin as Artist and Outlaw. With attention to issues of race, criminality, panoptic power and transnationalism, its central concern is with Baldwin's coevally forced and voluntary exiles to France and Istanbul, Turkey as well as his vexed alienation from Africa and the American South. Wallace's essays have appeared in American Literary History and Journal of African American History and four critical anthologies.