Psychic Distantiation

Abstract

In his essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin harshly critiques Harriet Beecher Stowe’s use of representative political aesthetics in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Baldwin makes the case that it is not the representative stories we tell ourselves about the stability of the world and our place within it that constitute true political writing, but rather the attempts to save ourselves from reification under the policing that those stories necessarily enforce. He writes, “Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void. Within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden. From this void—ourselves—it is the function of society to protect us; but it is only this void, our unknown selves, demanding, forever, a new act of creation, which can save us—‘from the evil that is in the world.’”¹ Baldwin here suggests that the truly political is to be found in “a new act of creation.” But what might it mean to perform such an act? How do we face the void of our selves and those selves’ demands, particularly in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, when our societal myths constitute us through a powerful hegemony of racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual identities that give us—and keep us in—our place in the world?