Reading James Baldwin: Viet Thanh Nguyen - No Name in the Street

No Name in the Street was James Baldwin’s first book after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. If The Fire Next Time was prophecy, No Name in the Street was the reckoning. Baldwin offers a tragic assessment of the Black Freedom movement and an unsparing judgment of the nation’s betrayal of that movement. The book is about the trauma of loss, the fragmentation of memory, and the desperate struggle to hold on to hope.

“The central contradictions that Baldwin is working with are the central contradictions of the country itself,” writes Viet Thanh Nguyen. “They are the contradictions of the founding of the country, and many of his insights come about from his time outside of this country. He had things to say about the role of the United States as an imperialist country, and how that imperialism could not be separated from the domestic issues of race and inequality.”

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Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and it was recently turned into an HBO series. His other books include The Committed; The Refugees; Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. His next book is To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, forthcoming in 2025. He edited the anthology The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives and is a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California.

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Few American writers have marked their era as powerfully as James Baldwin. As distinctive on the page as on the airwaves, his voice is indelibly associated with the demand for racial justice in the United States, a demand that continues to make him one of our most pressing and urgent contemporaries.

To mark Baldwin’s centenary, the Authors Guild Foundation invites you to join a conversation featuring some of our most exciting writers, scholars, and essayists as we gather to celebrate, study, and reflect on the legacy of Baldwin’s life and work.

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The painting of James Baldwin in the graphic above is by Beauford Delaney and reprinted courtesy of the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.

Beauford Delaney (1901–1979), James Baldwin, c.1945–50, oil on canvasboard, 24 x 18 inches / 61 x 45.7 cm, estate stamp; Private Collection; © Estate of Beauford Delaney, by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, Court Appointed Administrator, Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

Host or Publisher Authors Guild Foundation