John Drabinski (2:56)

Thank you. I'm super happy to be here. I had a slew of books come out and this is my first time getting a chance to talk about it. So I appreciate your time taking time to talk to me about this. I look forward to conversation.

Sarah Tyson (3:09)

Me too. Well, will you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background as a theorist and how you came to write this book on Baldwin?

John Drabinski (3:17)

So I was thinking about this. I mean, there's a short version, there's a very long version, because I can talk for a long time, as any of my students can attest, but I'll try to give a sort of more medium length version. I have had a kind of quirky intellectual journey. I did my PhD in Philosophy at University of Memphis, wrote my dissertation on Emmanuel Levinas in classical phenomenology with Robert Bernasconi, and trained really in post World War II Jewish philosophy, post structuralism. And when I finished my dissertation, I had a postdoctoral fellowship at Florida Atlantic University. And that allowed me to finish my book manuscript, which was my dissertation revised. And like most people finishing their first book, I came across that existential experience that no one warns you about, which is, what am I going to do next? And I had settled on a project on Post World War II Cinema, Jewish Cinema or cinema about the Holocaust. Right. Particularly around Claude Lanzmann's film Show Up. And I was interested in questions of trauma and loss and how cinema could be an intervention in these kinds of questions, the sort of postmodern paradoxes about representation and absence and how trauma and particularly the disaster of the Holocaust or shape those questions. And I gave a talk at a conference in Lima, Peru. And after I got done, I happened to be sitting next to Salomon Lerner, who was one of the conveners of the conference, later became the lead commissioner of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. So Philosophy PhDs and Professors can goes places in this world. He's a Cotton Heidegger scholar. But we were sitting and we were talking and he started asking me questions about why I got into this project. And, you know, are you European? Did you lose family in the Holocaust? And, you know, my answers to this were no. Like, my family's from Los Angeles, very West coast, you know, don't have any sort of relationship to European roots at all. And. And, you know, it was interesting that he was asking me these questions. It was making me sort of think about, like, why? Why do these things interest me? But then he said this thing being very generous, sort of like your prodigious talents, type of, you know, puff up your. He says, have you ever thought about bringing your talents as a thinker and writer to the Americas? Because that very name, America, is synonymous with trauma and loss. And we have all been reckoning with what it means to live on for hundreds of years after this trauma and loss. And then we just moved on with dinner. I had had a scheduled trip just by myself down through Bolivia and Uruguay. And so I took this two week long trip by myself and I couldn't stop thinking about. And I got back to Florida Atlantic University and I sat down with the reference librarian and I just said, could you generate a list on the black Americas and philosophy or things that are theoretical starting from the beginning? Because I did a great books program in college, and that's how I. How I think about how you learn and how you learn traditions. You start with the first and then you end with the most recent. And just a wonderful person at the library, you know, he's like, this is what I'm trained for. And generated this massive bibliography. And I really started what was a sort of 10 to 14 year reading project of reading every day, reading multiple books a week to learn the black intellectual tradition. And that had real effects. I taught for a few years in philosophy departments and then moved to Hampshire College, where I was teaching an interdisciplinary department. You know, they don't have departments, they have schools of thought. And then ended up at Amherst College in the Black studies department for many years. And my initial sort of focus, and still to this day, my primary focus in that reading project, in learning the black intellectual tradition in the Americas, was a Francophone tradition. And that was for a couple of reasons. There's an affinity I have for this hyperbole and intensity of Francophone thought, wherever it is. Something about the character, something about the tradition, both in Africa, the Caribbean and in Europe. I love its hyperbole, its exaggeration, its grandeur. I was really drawn to that. And also a more practical thing, which is I knew if I was going to keep writing in the United States, if I was working with untranslated materials, there would always be a place for me to publish this stuff. But I started getting interested in more Anglophone, Caribbean and African American thought. And while I was at the black, in the Black Studies department at Amherst College, I shared an office with my late colleague and friend Jeff Ferguson. And he was always saying, you know, we talk about ideas and we talk about lots of things to talk about music and boxing and. But we. When we talked about ideas, he was. He used to always say he was an African American specialist, mid century, sort of Ellison, Richard Wright. Baldwin used to always say, all your questions are answered by James Baldwin. You need to read him. And I had read a few things here and there, but I just spent one summer. I was just like, you know what, Jeff? You know, I'm gonna get you off my back. Like, I'm just gonna read the price of the ticket. I'm gonna read the entire collected non. And I read it cover to cover very quickly because I just became completely enthralled by Baldwin and his prose and his real hesitating style. There was something that I felt deeply connected to, and I thought he had some absolutely enigmatic insights that went well beyond some of the more quotable aspects of Baldwin's work. And I came back and had to sort of begrudgingly admit to Jeff that actually most of my questions were answered in Baldwin. Baldwin. He never let me forget it. I mean, I think one of the last times I talked to him, he was like, when you finishing that book on Baldwin? Because remember how I told you dedicated the book to him, obviously for that reason. And so I taught a couple of Baldwin seminars at Amherst College. And I just thought, you know, I think there's a book project here. I spent a year at the Du Bois Institute, then the Du Bois Institute, now the Hutchins center at Harvard. And I just spent that that year. And I wrote a couple drafts of a couple of chapters. I published a couple of articles on Baldwin, and I had this book sort of 2/3 of the way written, and I just sat on it for seven, eight years. And sitting on an almost completed book manuscript is, I think, kind of the definition of full professor extravagance. Nothing urgent, but I wanted to get the book right. It's up to readers to figure out if I got it right. But I wanted to teach Baldwin a lot more. And then when I got to University of Maryland in fall of 2021, I taught us a class on Baldwin. And the students, they just really. I was really struck by their brilliance. The students here are just really smart undergraduates. And I was like, they seem to think that this is a really interesting way to talk about the world, not about James Baldwin, because what do they. This is their introduction to Baldwin. What do they know about that? But they were like, this is such an Interesting way to talk about the world. And I just recommitted to the. The book and really just plowed my way through it. And it's my first book that is exclusively on English language sources, by the way. It goes a lot quicker if you don't have to go back and check translations. But also I thought coming back to that story with Salomon in Lima, it's like, this is my first time talking about where I'm from, the United States. And there's something very significant about that that I also wanted to get it right because I thought I'm really taking him up on his challenge to put these questions of trauma, loss, and what it means that life goes on at my very front doorstep rather than even across the Caribbean or across the Atlantic. And so there's an intimacy to the book. I'm not African American, but Baldwin is speaking to the very foundations and foundational traumas and wound the nation. And I was like, this is right at my doorstep. And I wanted to get it right. And so I took a lot of time with it. I think it's a lot shorter than it would have been if I had just written it when I wanted to first to write it. But hopefully it's better because of that.

Sarah Tyson (11:58)

And yeah, let's go. Because it is so much about the United States, but it's in the context of the black Atlantic. So can you tell us more about why you sought to understand Baldwin and relation to the mid 20th century Black Atlantic milieu of thinkers and writers?

John Drabinski (12:18)

So I think that this so unimaginable a Price is my sixth book and every book that I've written, I ask myself a question. It's some version of, does this book need to be written? So for my version of asking that question is, do I have something to say that no one else has said? And do I think that it's. I don't know. I don't know how to put it without sounding as. I don't mean it in a judgy way, but as being like, shocking that no one has asked this question. You know, I think about, you know, other works, like my book on. On Jean Luc Godard. I was like, no one has written about Godard 70s cinema in relation to post structuralism. This is wild to me. This is the same intellectual circles. And this was this moment where I said, you know, Baldwin was a part of, of course, a very intimate group of writers, you know, Lorraine Hansberry, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright in particular, but he was also a part or he was also writing at the same time as there's this explosion of discourse and debate was often very contentious in the black Atlantic world in the Caribbean and Western Africa and. And of course, the United States that Baldwin, on the one hand, doesn't talk about and does talk about. You know, he will have mentions here and there of, you know, Ma Cesaire in particular, Princes and Powers or Leopold Senghor. But for me, it's not really about what was Baldwin talking about. It was, where was Baldwin writing? And he's writing in a black Atlantic context. Because these same questions about the. About language, about what is a home, what is a sense of place, what is the relationship with the past and future, and what is culture and what is politics in the present? These were questions across the black Atlantic world. So I thought, you know, I think there's a certain kind of literacy that's required for that. And that's what I had been doing as a teacher, as a reader and as a writer for many years. And so I felt like I could bring a different context to read reading Baldwin than other people who've written on Baldwin do. And they have literacies I don't have, of course. But also, I think it's important to read thinkers like James Baldwin, who, frankly, is a very narrow reader in terms of what you see referenced in his work. He's very narrow reader. He doesn't have a lot of international curiosity. But for me, I find it there's such a limit when we only look at what the writer talks about. And I think the ability to read absences and the significance. Significance of absences in somebody's work is as important as reading what's present in their work. This in some ways goes all the way back to my doctoral training in post structuralism and French thought. Is the function of absences to both pull together and tear apart, to be both a poison and a cure of any text is a productive critical frame as a. As a reader and writer. And so I tried to bring that to Baldwin, to, you know, I guess a short answer to your question is to say something new about his work. Because a lot has been said about it. Very little of it is theoretical and almost none of it is concerned outside the United States. But I was like, the 1950s and 1960s were such an explosion of discourse. I mean, just the sheer number of thinkers and who were writing in that time. And I only pick a few. Right. But this was such an enormous moment. It's the independence of. Of all these nations and what it means for them as citizens, as writers. As intellectuals, as human beings, as collectives. Why not read Baldwin in the context of that? I mean, that's. It's the moment and he's a part of it in his own way and is not and that both of those are interesting to me.

Sarah Tyson (16:27)

Yeah.

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Sarah Tyson (17:57)

Well, the first chapter takes up origin stories, and there you center the importance of the material and the conceptual auction block for Baldwin sinking. And you do this discussing Glissant du Bois, Alain Locke, even a little bit Douglas. And why, I guess, why is it important to tell a story of origin for Baldwin, especially in relationship to those thinkers?

John Drabinski (18:26)

Well, I think generally origin stories are really interesting. I know that in a lot of corners of critical theory, origins are the thing that it's a word that raises a lot of skepticism and the sort of one eyebrow pops up. But I think origin stories are the most interesting and most compelling stories that. That are told. You know that for me, they're so intriguing even when they're problematic, even if they're to be criticized because of what they reveal. I don't particularly find anything problematic about what Baldwin says. I mean, you know, there's a difference between, say, an origin story of Baldwin and an origin story in Martin Heidegger's work. Right. This a blood and soil of Baldwin is not the blood and soil of Heidegger, you know, to put it lightly. But so I'm just interested in origin stories generally. But I think what interests me about that sense of origin story is how important it is for Baldwin, which I think was really a question. And that is, I think one of the threads that is quietly holding the book together is Baldwin's. The exploration in Baldwin's work of the claim that African Americans are their own people. Right. That he really moves away from any kind of deep connection to race discourse. He certainly moves away from any notion of diaspora, something that really distinguishes him from his mid century moment in so many ways. And so it's like it's not enough to just say, well, Baldwin was really not a diasporic thinker. He didn't really think about Pan African or transatlantic identity or racial identity. But it's like he'd still be thinks about identity and sort of how would he think about that? And I put him mostly in dialogue in that opening chapter with Edouard Glissant, who has a similar question about thinking about Caribbeanness rather than African Americanness in the case of Baldwin. And for Glissant, like for so many post France Fanon, post Fanonian Caribbean writers compelled by the Middle Passage to think about the Middle Passage as a site of ultimate loss. And that really what the Caribbean is beginning again from the abyss. My book that from 2019, glissant in the Middle Passage is a long exploration of that. And so I sort of carried that interest, like why is Baldwin not interested in the Middle Passage in his origin story? And why instead this notion of the auction block? And I find it really interesting in part because it is true that the Middle Passage is not a story of African American experience in the way that the auction block is in music and the spirituals. And as you said, talking about Douglas, talking about Du Bois, talking about Locke. And there's a different sense of the sort of founding wound of African American identity in that I found that. But I really found the resources for that in some of his uncollected essays, not from the Cross of Redemption collection rather than the Price of the Ticket, which was also interesting to me. I wonder how this book would have been different if it had been written 20 years earlier. But one of the things that's interesting to me that connects Glissant in the Caribbean and BALDWIN in the U.S. is this notion that the origin is carried through history in the Cry, Right. And so for Glissant, there's this sense of the cry that operates inside of creolized languages. But for Baldwin, the cry of the auction block is in the spirituals. It's in everything that the spirituals bequeath, you know, for him, as he says at one point in the Sound and Face of Ray Charles. And in that, Baldwin actually does join, as I said before, about. About Douglass, Du Bois, Locke, others, joins a tradition there of seeing the spirituals as not just a foundation of a certain kind of musical tradition or religious practice, but of an entire identity. And that the weight of that identity for Baldwin, and this, again, this is what I find so compelling. The weight of that identity is to create an entirely separate people. That African Americanness, rooted in the cry of the auction block, becomes the foundation of an identity that's unprecedented and had to begin from something. And if you begin from something, you can begin from the abyss, the middle passage, or you can begin from the auction block. And that's that auction block in its direct narrative relationship to the spirituals and to the African American expressive tradition that I think, think is one of Baldwin's most profound insights and one that I think shapes the book. That's why it's the opening chapter, not just because it's the first chapter. It's an origin story, the book origins there. It's really more that. I think it's the thread that holds the entire thing together.

Sarah Tyson (23:39)

You then move to thinking through key images from Baldwin. And I'm curious. Baldwin's got a lot of great images. He's an evocative writer. And so I'm curious how you came to organize the arc of the book around these particular images. So will you walk us through which images you chose and then how that chapter kind of came together around those sort of three stages of images, I guess is one way to put it.

John Drabinski (24:10)

Yeah. So the arc of that second chapter is the image of the African, right? The image of the white. And then the dialectical relationship between those two that produces what he calls the Negro. And the Negro becomes what I would call this African American, this new sense of identity. And I think that it works at the level of images, but it also works at the level of a deep existential and dialectical dependency, in the case of white people, on the objection of black people. That's that second stage, right, where I talk about Norman Mailer and William Faulkner as these exemplary whites, for him, whose entire identity is dependent upon a certain. As white people is dependent on a certain conception of the life of black people. Whether it's the need for something about the Old south. And Faulkner, who wants to slow down progress, not just because he's politically conservative, but because he sees that everything is at stake. I think that's a really sensitive insight of Baldwin's. That it's not that Faulkner is just this old white Southern man. It's that he actually understands what's at stake. And as much as Baldwin's impatient, he's like, I get why he wants to hesitate. White people are completely dependent upon this. And then Mailer's sort of exotic, sort of attraction to African Americanness and black culture is this dependency on this sort of wild, sexual, overly expressive other versus with that he can understand himself as a repressed. Like white people, as repressed as stifled and mannered and ordered. But I think really the most important part of that chapter for me is Baldwin's encounter with what I would maybe call. If I was to rewrite the book in more dramatic terms, the spectacular character of blackness that a lot of his early essays especially will talk about, or essays about his early life will talk about. And I have a section on Haile Selassie, seeing Selassie on tv. And it's the spectacle of Selassie as like, the unconquered African. The unconquered blackness, in that sense of the unvanquished is, for Baldwin, so important because it has a certain psychological function for a group of people. For him, African Americans in what he calls the ghetto, right? So poor black people in Harlem to have been vanquished by the entire machine of white hegemony in this country. The unvanquished blackness is so important as a spectacle. But he's skeptical of it because he's like, this doesn't actually produce anything about who and what we are. But it is this kind of jolt out of that. I'm also interested in there, in the image of Ghana and Kwame Nkrumah in particular, which in some ways, I got the book started. I was like, how could Baldwin be writing in the 50s and 60s and never talk about Ghana and Nkrumah? I mean, everybody does. Everybody around him is obsessed with Ghana, as they should be. I mean, this is like not only the spectacular independence moment, but is also the spectacular possibility of Pan African solidarity, certainly across the continent, but even across the Atlantic. And Baldwin says nothing. And so back to what I was saying before, I think it's important to read Absences. And I was interested in how. What does it mean that he doesn't talk about Nkrumah? What does that say about Africa? And then the third sort of African in that is this very weird moment that he reports in Princes and Powers where Leopold Senghor is giving a paper at the 1956 Paris Congress of Black Writers and Artists. And he. He refers to Richard Wright as the great African novelist. And I mean, Baldwin is incredulous and he's like, what are you talking about? It's one of the few times he is actually sympathetic and positive about Richard Wright.

Sarah Tyson (28:32)

He's nice about Wright in that moment.

John Drabinski (28:33)

Just for once, I was like, thank you. Could you please get off this guy's back for once? I don't know, I just a little obsessed with Wright. But anyway, and that, that, you know, that that's the moment where he's like, Richard Rice from Mississippi, lived in Chicago, lived in Harlem. I mean, this is. He's a quintessential African American. Like, he's deeply American. I mean, these are the three most American places you could be as a black person, you know, in Baldwin's mind. And, you know, how could you possibly associate this with the. The spectacular notion of blackness that orients that 1956 Congress, that orients a kind of diasporic vision that Nkrumah help represent the Pan African possibility that Selassie does for the imagination of the viewer. Poor black child James in Harlem, you know, imagining a different kind of possibility. You know, all these, like, ways he reports it. And I think what's important about that set of images, especially about Africans, is that I think it returns Baldwin to the United States and the distinctiveness of the African Americans. And that results that sort of dialectical movement from those three Africans, the two whites, to this notion of the Negro, where he again returns to Richard Wright. As Richard Wright is shaped by his characters. That is, his characters are shaped by these forces. And being shaped by these forces, they're pathological. Because Baldwin, you know, can't sort of see Richard Wright as fully realizing this insight. You know, I've lots of thoughts on that. But. But he can't fully realize that insight. But. But Richard Wright has done this essential work of showing what it means to be shaped from the ground up from your very origins by the United States. And that. That has created a different kind of person, that bigger Thomas is a particular kind of pathological version of that. But there are other possibilities. But it's a dialectical outcome of spectacular blackness, sort of contingent whiteness. And the African Americanness becomes this other possibility that emerges out of that, that evokes. I don't think I quote it, but this, this, this amazing line from Albert Murray where he says, he says, he says negro culture is mulatto. And it was this puzzle for me, like, you know, this, like, why is black culture mulatto? And he means exactly that, that it emerges out of this, this, this conflict between an idea of blackness, the hegemony of whiteness, to produce this thing called black culture. And I think Baldwin has already done that work, the Murray's doing it, you know, many years later. But I had that very much in mind in moving across that trap. Dr. Yeah.

Sarah Tyson (31:28)

And this helps understand some of the complexity of the reading that you then go into the comparative reading of Fanon and Baldwin. And I did wonder if perhaps this chapter was the origin of the book. But it sounds like it was rather some of the work of the last chapter. But you note how allied these two thinkers are on so much of the diagnosis of what's happened and what's happening. But that vernacular cultural production makes a huge difference in Baldwin's development from the diagnosis, what he thinks is possible compared to Fanon or what he thinks needs to happen. And so will you flesh out a little bit this comparative reading and maybe what brought you to trying to think them together in particular, and then the importance of vernacular cultural production, of expressive culture.

John Drabinski (32:26)

Yeah. So I feel, I don't know, seen or exposed or a combination of those two. In your observation, it was, in fact, it did precede the book project.

Sarah Tyson (32:36)

Oh, okay. Okay.

John Drabinski (32:38)

Yeah. It was originally, the original version of. It was an essay in Phanax, which was an existential phenomenology journal out of somewhere in Canada, I forget, maybe University of Windsor, but it was the first time I had published anything on Baldwin. And part of my sort of intellectual narrative is going from francophone to us. And that was really. It was the first essay that I did that with. And I was like, how can I engage with Fanon in a critical way from a U.S. perspective? And so the origin of that chapter, which now is this essay that came before the book, was is this part, this, this lot, this couple of, of remarks that Fanon makes about blues and jazz, by which jazz he really means, like Louis Armstrong and the early New Orleans jazz, where he's, you know, he is absolutely sees blues and jazz as abject. He's like, these are, this is like a, you know, an expression of submission to the slave master. And, you know, let's be honest, I mean, that's always pissed me off. I was like, I was like, this is a musical tradition that changed the globe, right? And that like. And also, like, why would you think that? Like, you know, and then I was like, well, this is one of these things where he's like observing from completely. I mean, he's writing this from Algeria, you know, having been in, you know, in France and Martinique. And, you know, it's just a gap, like a kind of, you know, anytime you speculate on another. Another culture, maybe you just get some things wrong. But I was like. But other than sort of like Fanon the person or something, I was like, what is the deep thing going on here? You know, theoretically. And so what I try to argue in that chapter is that both of them, both Fanon and Baldwin understand that the. One of the. The deep effects and affects of. Of anti blackness is the creation of a structure of shame in the psyche, right? And that's why Salassi is so important to the early young James Baldwin is that the spectacle of the unvanquished black person or black people, in the case of Ethiopia, that sense of the unvanquished is like a corrective to the shame, right? It pushes so hard back. But the point is that there's this affective structure of shame that. That anti blackness builds and that Fanon in black skin, white masks, articulates many of those same themes. And like, what is the exit out of that? You know, and for Fanon, I mean, Fanon has. It's kind of his trick across his work. And every, I think every great theorist has a trick, right? This is something that changes the world. And his. So I don't mean trick in a negative way. Is this break with the past, right? This pure future, a new humanism. And I always was interested in the way that Baldwin refuses to ever think like that. Like, we need to be new people. It's like who we have been. You know, speaking from Baldwin's voice, who we have been as African Americans is. Is plenty. Like, it's everything. Like, we don't need more than that. What we need to do is understand it in richer ways. And that's where vernacular culture is so important for me, because I. That again. And what Fanon says about jazz and blues, I'm like, well, vernacular culture has functioned as this foundation of a whole tradition. And it's not just a tradition that's kind of interesting. It's a tradition that like all real traditions make a people a people. And so it has that sense of significance. And so when Baldwin says, you know, when he moves to Europe and he says all he needed was a typewriter and a Bessie Smith record I was like, why Bessie Smith record? It's because he needed his identity with him, his identity as a writer and his identity as African American. In it was Bessie Smith. And you know, she's that. I mean, she's a blues singer, but she's really positioned in that in some ways between blues and jazz. She's exactly what Fanon was saying was abject. And exactly what Baldwin was saying is what makes me a person. And if it's what makes me a person and a whole person. Shame is of course something that breaks us up as people. Right. And so the thing that makes it whole is the very thing Fanon was sort of associating with an expression of shame or objection and disgust. And so vernacular culture for me in that chapter is the. Is the. I don't want to call it the cure to shame, but it's like the counter narrative to shame and therefore is a counter narrative to anti blackness that makes a black identity possible that's not forged through an encounter with an anti black interracial world.

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Sarah Tyson (37:47)

And you continue thinking about the importance of vernacular cultural production, particularly in relation to the language and world for Baldwin, which I think really ties to what you were just saying about this divergence between Fanon and Baldwin on whether what's needed is sort of an apocalyptic break or is there something already happening? And this really sets Baldwin apart from many thinkers in the mid century black Atlantic, as you make the case, I think. And so where does this attention to language and world take him?

John Drabinski (38:25)

Well, I think in some ways you said it. Language is, I mean, you can't get anything more essential to a culture than its language. And cultures change through language changes and language infusions. And so I think for Baldwin, Baldwin eventually has to come around to the question just thinking about the foundations of his thought as a theorist, very theoretical writer. I'm glad that this book is out and I hope people read it because I want him to be appreciated that way. He's a deeply theoretical writer and his theoretical constellation is such that at some point he had to come talk about what he calls black English. And when he talks about black English, he says, I think exactly what pulls this notion of vernacular Culture together, which is that Black English is related to origins, related to an origin story. It has, whether it's in its tropes or in its sound, and therefore all of its practices, the relationship to the. To the cry of the auction block, to the pain of the past, but also the way through blues and jazz, that pain, in a sort of moment of sorcery, is able to be the sublime and beautiful expression and expressive tradition. And that Black English is not just part of that, but is really the foundation of that. And so a defense of black English, which I think the way he poses it is a way of asserting, again, the uniqueness and singularity of African American identity, right? It's not the English of Jamaica. It's not the English of Ghana. It's not the English of London, right? It's its own English. So it can be the foundation structure of a people, but it also is a language that is necessary. It's not an occasional piece of who and what a people or how a people speak, but is essential to the very meaning, right, of a collective, of an identity. And in that way, it has words for everything. It names a whole world. And that world cannot be named without that language. And so vernacular culture then becomes not just a sort of set of expressive traditions, but instead a notion of world, which is exactly what, for me, what light, how language always functions. You know, in that chapter, I. I'm sure I can't remember, but I'm sure I must have quoted Fanon in the opening pages of Black Skin, White Mask, where he says to. To speak a language is to adopt a world. And so for Fanon, it's like, you know, I'm adopting French civilization, and that's alienating. And I think Baldwin's defense of Black English is just to say, yeah, we adopt a world when we speak black English. It's our world. It's not alienating. And to adopt another English is to. To alienate oneself. And, you know, not to. Not to use students as authorities, but some ways they are. But every time I've taught this, and I teach a similar thing in Caribbean thought around Creole languages and patois and pidgins, students in that class are so galvanized by this, they're just like, wait, you mean I shouldn't hide the way I speak at home or in my community or that it's actually important, and I'm always like, is there a kind of reason why you would speak that way, or is it just like a habit? They're like, now that I think about it, there is A reason. If I don't, it's like I don't belong or I'm out of place. It's like, exactly that. Belonging and being in place, that's what Baldwin's after. And, I mean, that's like a deep philosophical commitment that I have that language and world and thought are inseparable. And so a defense of a language is defensible way of thinking and a defensible world. And, I mean, I think it's a chapter that holds together the best, to be honest.

Sarah Tyson (42:39)

I mean, I'll just say that it made me read Fanon differently as well. Right. It made me think about some of his thoughts on French language quite differently, given this reading with Baldwin. You then write of home as the. And I'm taking some liberties here with how I put together this quotation, but you write of. Of home as the most complicated existential space in Baldwin's nonfiction. So how does Baldwin witness home and make room for its existential complexity?

John Drabinski (43:14)

I mean, this chapter on home was actually the paper that I wrote when I was at the Du Bois Institute, sort of at the Du Bois Institute, now Hutchins center, if anybody's eligible. Listening to this scholar, you got to get the fellowship there. All you do is sit around and you're, like, half drunk by lunch, having eaten free amazing food from some great spot in Cambridge, and then you have to give one paper a year. It's the most decadent fellowship ever. Get me there today. But I gave this talk, and one of the reasons why I wanted to give the talk was on Home is because I. It was the one thing that I was like, how can I actually figure out how to talk about this? Because Baldwin is really insistent on a sense of home, right? And Princess and Powers, he's like, you know, he says, you know, my ancestors purchased title to this land with their blood. And I'm like, purchase title, ancestor, blood, land. I mean, this. This is the most. And he's not a dramatic writer in many ways. I think he's actually a very sober writer. This is some dramatic shit. He means it. But why would you claim a home in a place that doesn't want you? Not only a place that doesn't want you, but is going to try to make you not want yourself and not want the place? And so why would you claim this place as home? How could I make sense of this? And I remember saying I was going to talk about Baldwin in home when I first arrived, and I didn't give my talk until April, but I panicked all year because I was like, I don't know how to make sense of this. It's really difficult. But you know what I turned to? And I had to take the quotation out because you can't get the rights to quote musical lyrics. But I had a quotation from Bessie Smith Song where she's talking about a flood and about this flood has devastated this part of the Mississippi Delta, and there's no one coming to save anyone. People are dying, you know, hunger and disease. And it's just an immense. I mean, it's a real blues song that has deep historical roots. And then she says, but this is my home. And I was like, when he said he wanted a Bessie Smith record, and now I'm reading this, listening to this lyric and then writing it out and listening to it and reading it over and over, and I'm like, you know, how do you think pain and home at the same time? And I'm not sure if the chapter is able to resolve the complexity of that, because I do think it's a paradox, but I think not. I think the way I think about it, and I do think I get clearer on this in a sustained way in my book at the Margins of Nihilism, which just came out in late January, is that home for Baldwin is not the nation broadly, but is this interstitial space produced by anti black, you know, form practices of anti blackness. Everything from so economic to cultural to existential, like, you don't belong here, right? But. But produces this. This interstitial space that is a different sense of relationships that make worlds and therefore can make homes. And like so much of Baldwin, I think I got most clarity on this in his confrontation with Richard Wright, where he says it's a provocative thing, again for him to say about Richard Wright. He says the one thing that Richard Wright doesn't understand is, and this is Baldwin's phrase, is the relationship Negroes bear to one another. And that's a relationship between black people, people that happens not in the shadow of an interracial world that is saturated with so much anti black violence, but is actually just entirely its own space, its own sense of the margin. Not as margin as like pushed out to the edge and therefore still having this relationship to the interracial, but margin in the sense, like Anzaldua talked about La Frontera, right? It's literally this, its entire borderlands, and it's a land and it's a place. And so. So thinking about vernacular culture and expressive culture as having a meaning in an interracial world, that's fraught and critical and confrontational and complex. And then in some ways the complexity, maybe the paradox at one level, but also the quite simple, straightforward everydayness of vernacular culture in that relationship that Negroes bear to one another, as he put it. And that was would that's that place of home for him, what that home means for an interracial space. I think a lot of his fiction is an exploration of the possibilities and impossibilities around that. Some of the stuff like the fire next time talking about, you know, white people as devils. But also maybe there's a Bobby Kennedy, but also Bobby Kennedy betrays. And I mean, it's all that so fraught. But there's always this other thing that I think is important to hold on to as home, which is generated by the meaning of vernacular culture in that relationship, relationship between black people that does not include the specter, ghost or hand of white people as co. Present.

Sarah Tyson (48:47)

Yeah. And you talk about how Baldwin's attention to that interstitial life makes possible a kind of optimism that you do not develop as oppositional to Afro pessimism, but you talk about it as a deeper alternative. In many ways, I think you acknowledge so much of what Afropessimism argues as important and are not seeking to oppose a sort of optimism of this interstitial life to it, but you do call it a deeper alternative, something that gets beneath it. So can you say more about that?

John Drabinski (49:31)

Yeah, and not to. As I say in my other work, I mean, it's so awful sounding. But in my other work, actually in at the Margins of Nihilism, it is a sustained treatment of this very question. And one of the things I completed the two books, as well as this other book, Atlantic Theory, at the same time, and I had to make a choice about how to write that chapter on Baldwin and what I call Afro optimism, which is not sort of Moton or some of these other sort of ideas of optimism that have debated Afro pessimism, but a whole different kind of thing. And I had to hold back a lot that I think is in at the margins of nihilism, around sort of the, you know, more intensive interrogations of the question of ontology. And is. Is being a closed system or as being always fractured at its margins. That's what I talk about at the margins of nihilism is that margins at the margins of nihilism is interstitial life, which is actually, you know, a deconstructive, you know, insight into the structure of being. Right. It always has an opening. Every closed system has an opening. And what is in that opening is an alternative sense of life. I think that's what I was trying to do in a slightly different register in that. That chapter on optimism and Afro pessimism. To say, you know, know, Baldwin is not ever going to. To. Would never contest something like the pessimism of Afro pessimism. Part of what I do in. In. In Margins of Nihilism is. Is look at. I mean, one of the chapters is on Baldwin's nihilism. And it's like, look, the way he talks about the ghetto is exactly an ontology of. Of pessimism. And it's really important that he understands completely the scope of that and the risks of what J called, you know, the social life of blackness. Right, the social life of social death. But I think there's a sense of social life that is outside the structure of social death. And that's what this. What vernacular culture thought in those terms of, again, to use Baldwin's phrase, of the relation Negroes bear to one another, right. Vernacular culture understood in that context is something completely different than vernacular culture practice in an interracial world world. And it's the kind of optimism that refuses the idea that in order to be optimistic or pessimistic, you have to be in relation to white people. That there's a possibility of black relationality to black that is not black relationality to white. Because that black relationality to white, that is the Afro pessimism, can't work without that. And so there's a real structural, theoretical question about the scope of whiteness. Does it reach into everything? Is it a total conquest? And I think Baldwin's articulation of home, of language, of affect and of origin story is one long argument that there is this other world, and it's a world that has meaning and ought to be thought on its own terms. And that is a place for an optimism. He says this thing that people love to quote in the sort of meme context, but also I think, even in scholarship. And he says, of course, I'm an optimist because I'm alive, but I think that alive, like where is Baldwin alive? Not in an interracial world. That's a space of what we've come to call social death for him too, right. See, my chapter in at the Margins of Nihilism. I document that as well as I can. But that sense of being alive is in this. This world of a relationship between black people, people that actually has meaning, substance, names for everything, everything that makes a world and makes meaning and Makes home. And that's a place to live. And that's why he takes Bessie Smith with him, not just his typewriter.

Sarah Tyson (53:33)

I feel weird asking this as somebody who's just published three books, but what are you working on now?

John Drabinski (53:40)

I mean, you know, the gap between, like, finishing the book and it comes out, I'm just like, the old one that was like, old books. I was like. Because, you know, when you said, you know, let's talk about this book on the podcast, I was like, I got go, look at that. What did I say? But, yeah, I can't believe I had three books come out at once. I never actually expected that to happen. I thought they'd get rejected. But I do still have some things to say. So I have a project that I had been playing with for a while that's tentatively titled On Syntactical Intelligence, which is a slight variation on a phrase from Campbell Brathwaite. And that's really on Caribbean critical theory, around both syllabic and syntactical constructions of language. But in terms of writing, in terms of speaking, but also in terms of embodied expression across the Caribbean critical tradition. Talking about Suzanne Cesaire, Campbell Brathwaite, Patrick Shamo, Wilson Harris, and some other folks. And I've started writing on that. I have, you know, one of the proverbial five or six pages of every chapter drafted. But those are important for me because then I'm like, oh, I can expand things. It's. The first page is hard. I think more intimately related too, though, is this other project that picks up on so much of what we've been talking about with vernacular culture, which is a book on soul music, the Tentative. Because I believe in titles, I can't start without a title. Title is who Can Stand the Rain? Soul Music as Deconstructive Practice, which is going to be a very different kind of book. This syntactical intelligence book is really conventional. John Drabinsky, difficult to read, not very good prose, kind of theoretical text. But this book about soul music as deconstruction practice is going to try to get inside in a sort of deep phenomenology of listening, to think about how the soul of soul music. That's been a question in a lot of literature. What is soul thinking about soul as a structure of breaking apart time. And in that broken time, there's a certain affective transmission of knowledge, of a sense of being, a sense of relatedness and so forth. And really looking at soul music in particular, 1970s Memphis Soul High record, Teeny Hodges and the. The High rhythm section, I think, is the primary focus for me, as well as Ann Peebles vocals and just trying to. To write both in the first person and as a commentator. You know, I did my graduate work in Memphis. I've been obsessed with Memphis music since I was a teenager. And, you know, I write just such text based stuff. I was like, why not, you know, tremble as I start to say the number 57 years old and, you know, hurtling towards 60. And I was like, I always wanted to write a different kind of book. Syntactical intelligence won't be a different kind of book, but this will be. And I was like, been waiting and waiting and waiting. And I was talking with my friend Mark Anthony Neal about this, who of course writes about music all the time. And we were doing a podcast for the Black studies podcast, and we were talking beforehand and I said this and he was like, just write it, man. Like, like, what are you waiting for? And I was like, I don't know. Thank you. Actually, I don't know why I'm waiting, but it's a chance for me to. To write. Theoretically, it would be a theoretical book about deconstruction. All right. But to think about soul music and think about why the sense of broken time, of. Of. Of. Of fractures in. In. In time of the lower frequencies, as Ralph Ellison put it, how it makes music work and how it changes our affective relationship to self and other. So we'll see. That one's got to get off the ground. I've written some sketches, but the first person stuff sounds so corny to me. I got to have an editor help me with that.

Sarah Tyson (58:00)

Excellent. Alex Mart. Well, John Drabinski, thank you so much for this conversation.

John Drabinski (58:05)

Thank you. It's really a treat and a privilege to be able to talk about my book. I feel a little self conscious because I'm like, why would I be talking about this book? But hopefully it's interesting. Hopefully. What I said was interesting too.

Sarah Tyson (58:17)

It was. Yeah. Thank you.

John Drabinski (58:19)

All right, take care.