"Non-Violence, Black Power and the Citizens of Pompeii: James Baldwin's 1968"

Radicalization for James Baldwin meant moving from the idea that experience was an essentially individual endeavor to the understanding of experience as a mutual reality. For a writer who established his career in the 1950s among New York intellectuals who premised the idea of freedom--as well as artistic achievement--in individual terms as part of American and Western Cold War propaganda efforts, this shift in Baldwin’s thinking, writing and living involved intense negotiations and confrontations at every level of this life. This talk touches upon moments in Baldwin’s career of radicalization beginning in 1963 and culminating in the tumultuous year of 1968.  

Ed Pavlić is author of more than a dozen books written across and between genres including: Call It In the Air (2022), a documentary lyric; Outward: Adrienne Rich’s Expanding Solitudes (2021), an itinerary across the poet’s full career in poems; Another Kind of Madness (2019), a novel set in contemporary Chicago and coastal Kenya; and Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners (2016), an exploration of Black music’s many roles in Baldwin’s life and work. He is currently at work on two books: “No Time to Rest: The Four Lives of James Baldwin,” a narrative of Baldwin’s career for the 21^st century, and “Like I Was Ink,” a memoir of racially non-binary experience. Pavlić is currently Distinguished Research Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Georgia.