Act as Lovers: Ethics of Love in James Baldwin’s Early Works

The rise, in the last decade or so, of political and social movements such as Black Lives Matter has coincided with a renewed attention and appreciation to the work of James Baldwin, notably, for his nuanced vision of race relations and his fundamental call to self-love and love. Author James Baldwin (1924-1987) wrote a large corpus of non-fiction and fiction works and was an outspoken civil rights activist, building personal relationships with important political and cultural figures of his time. In analyzing Baldwin’s fiction and non-fiction works, the aim of the following dissertation is, firstly, to pinpoint the author’s “Ethics of Love” and secondly, to understand how it translates to his first novels. This dissertation proposes in particular that Baldwin’s Ethics of Love is to be understood as a twofold movement: firstly disavowing hate as a force destroying the hater as well as the hated, and secondly, calling onto love, understood here as physical as well as mental engagement with the other, as the only viable solution to exit the spiral of hate. The following analysis focuses in particular on the novels Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952) and Another Country (1962), posing a reflection on themes such as: oppressive religion and religious symbolism, systemic racism and black masculinity, homosexual and interracial sexual desire, and suffering and interracial sympathy. This work will lead to the final observation that Baldwin’s work remains a relevant and nuanced portrait of American life even seventy years after its initial publication, providing radical answers to contemporary questions of race, gender, and sexuality.