South by Southeast: James Baldwin in Provence

Résumé 0

Despite the relative longevity of Saint-Paul-de-Vence as James Baldwin’s place of residence, critics have paid much less attention to it than they have to Paris and to Istanbul, where he spent his first two periods of exile. Saint-Paul was a peaceful refuge for Baldwin, far removed from the turbulence of American race relations and the burdens of publicity in cultural centers like New York and Paris. Yet Saint-Paul was more than just another site of exile for Baldwin. I will argue that Saint-Paul offered an imaginative territory to reconcile his longstanding antagonism to the American South, where he was conceived. A town in southern France becomes for Baldwin the perfect vantage point from which to write about the American South, which is the setting of much of his final novel Just Above My Head and his final work of non-fiction The Evidence of Things Not Seen. Although Baldwin’s later works written in Saint-Paul are certainly not devoid of racial violence, their distinct emphasis is on the attempt to recapture the lost innocence of youth in a southern setting, exactly as Baldwin did in Saint-Paul. Terrifying though the South may have been to Baldwin, it was his origin, and in order to confront this origin, he moved physically south of Paris to move imaginatively south of New York.