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James BaldwinA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“A Question of Identity” was originally published in Partisan Review in July/August 1954. Baldwin discusses the American student colony in Paris as a social phenomenon. He notes at the outset of the essay that it defies general description, but he proceeds to identify and describe different categories of American students in Paris. Writing as he was in the post-war years of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Baldwin notes that the expectation that American students in Paris were mostly ex-GIs is inaccurate. For Baldwin, the two main categories of American students in Paris are those who embrace home and those who embrace the continent. The former end up disillusioned with Paris, missing the familiarity of America, and pack their bags to go home. The latter adapt themselves to Parisian life so thoroughly that they have no desire to speak English let alone return to America.
Baldwin acknowledges that these two types represent two extremes, with far more gradations in between. Nonetheless, he writes, every American in Europe is everywhere confronted with the question of identity. For Baldwin, many of these Americans abroad are bewildered by this question and the tensions therein. The reason for this confusion, he avers, is that they are quintessentially American: they have a flimsy sense of time, a sentimental understanding of society’s limitations, and a distorted notion that their shapelessness is actually freedom. In the end, Baldwin suggests that discovering American identity from the vantage point of Europe can end the alienation of the American from themselves.
Baldwin’s “A Question of Identity” is both familiar to the reader of Notes of a Native Son, and entirely unique. He treads familiar terrain of historical awareness, sense of self, and the vulnerability of genuine relationships. It is on these grounds that he frets about the wayward American student in Paris, lost to themselves and sinking ever deeper into the hallucinatory haze of American alienation. What is unique about this essay is that Baldwin never once mentions race or racism. His analysis of the American condition applies equally to White as to Black. Americanism is premised on a historical amnesia that allows its cultural chauvinism to proceed un-self-consciously. Although Black and White are certainly positioned differently within this cultural condition, and each sinks into self-alienation for related but differing reasons, it all arcs back to the same, shared history. Baldwin suggests that both Black and White yearn to distance themselves from the forces that produced them, and in so doing, be remade as individuals. “This assumption,” writes Baldwin, “is itself based on nothing less than our history, which is the history of the total, and willing, alienation of entire peoples from their forebears” (99). This history has created an entirely unprecedented people, and Americans who are able to view their country from abroad are better able to come to terms with this identity.
By James Baldwin
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