James Baldwin at One Hundred: An Extracurricular Reflection

LECTURE BY DR. WARREN CRICHLOW
introduction by Dr. Korina Jocson and Nicola Dove

Baldwin’s serendipitous “extracurricular” school life constitutes his formative autobiographical grounding -a powerful experience which he mined, as a writer, a “witness”, and a teacher to call out visible paradoxes of education. In and outside of school, Baldwin learned to defeat a circumscribed life of race and class intended for him by white society. Baldwin’s idiomatic fever and cosmopolitan riffing evinced in fiction and non-fiction, set flowing alternative yearnings among a generation of young readers-“giving us
license to imagine ourselves in the most expansive terms”. And in his centenary year, as I will discuss, Baldwin’s complex life of letters, his unwavering commitment to “tell it like it is”, continues to underwrite moral and ethical tasks he insisted are responsibilities of educational practice in dangerous times.

Dr. Warren Crichlow is Associate Professor (Emeritus) at York University, Toronto, Canada. He is most recently a co-editor of Spaces of New Colonialism: Reading Schools, Museums and Cities in the Tumult of Globalization (Peter Lang, 2020), and Curricular and Architectural Encounters with w. G. Sebald: Unsettling Complacency, Reconfiguring Subjectivity (Routledge, 2022). His Prodigious Presence: After the Door of No Return appears in the Spring 2023 issue of Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies: Special Issue on Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return at 20. His writing on film and moving-image installation includes Baldwin’s Rendezvous with the Twenty-first Century: I am Not Your Negro in Film Quarterly (2017) and (with Kass Banning) A Grand Panorama: Isaac Julien, Frederick Douglass, and Lessons of the Hour in Film Quarterly (2020). He is a Fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, South Africa.

This event is part of the Pondering Pedagogy Series, organized by the Office of the Associate Dean, Academic Programs, in the Faculty of Education.