Introduction

Abstract

‘From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came.’¹ With these words, James Baldwin commences his essay Stranger in the Village, a concussive reflection on racism in the mid-20th century. The text draws on his experiences in the Swiss Alpine village of Leukerbad, where he had spent time in the early 1950s escaping from the hectic life in Paris to work on his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain.² In his text, first published in Harper’s Magazine in 1953, Baldwin describes how he encounters blatant and manifest racism in this ‘white wilderness’ (160). The children in the alleys call him ‘Neger!’ (‘Negro!’) (161), the villagers constantly comment upon and touch his hair and skin (162). They do not believe that he is American, because ‘black men come from Africa’ (161); they treat him like an exotic curiosity and accuse him of stealing wood (168).³ Baldwin contrasts the barefaced racism of this village with the reality in the United States, where white people could not claim that ‘black men do not exist’ (174). In what constitutes a vibrant and sagacious contribution to whiteness studies avant la lettre, Baldwin analyses how ‘the idea of white supremacy rests simply on the fact that white men are the creators of civilization […] and therefore civilization’s guardians and defenders’ (172). He concludes that white identity formation relies on the constitutive exclusion of non-whites and therefore on the jealous policing of the borders of civilization.