Speculative Light

Amy J. Elias is Chancellor’s Professor and Director of the Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction and coeditor of Time: A Vocabulary of the Present and The Planetary Turn.

“This is a vibrant, timely, and vital collection of essays that illuminate how we can read James Baldwin through Beauford Delaney’s paintings and see Delaney’s paintings through Baldwin’s writing. Placing the lives and works of these two close friends side by side tells us much about kinship, intimacy, and craft, not only in relation to Delaney and Baldwin but in African American culture more broadly.” - Douglas Field, author of (Walking in the Dark: James Baldwin, My Father, and Me) “James Baldwin was most moving when recalling the aesthetic education he received from Beauford Delaney-who taught him both how to listen, ‘to hear [in Black music] what I had never dared or been able to hear,’ and how to see ‘and . . . trust what I saw.’ Speculative Light bears extraordinary witness to the lives of two men, devoted to their craft, moving always in the direction of wonder and uncertainty, buoyed by that loving and shared sense of attunement.” - Stephen Best, author of (None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life) "This book peers into an intimate relationship between two Black, queer men who grappled with the harsh lens of shame and found solace in their art and one another; two friends, platonic lovers, mentor and mentee, who knew each other in ways their voracious public could not. We owe much of Baldwin’s oeuvre to Delaney, and we owe it to Delaney to look again." - Jasmine Weber (Hyperallergic)

• List of Illustrations  xiiiAcknowledgments  xviiIntroduction. Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin / Amy J. Elias  1I. Circuits of Selfhood1. Jimmy and Beauford: The Bond of the Unusual Door / David Leeming  392. The Mentor: James Baldwin, Beauford Delaney, and the Habit of Doing / Hilton Als  503. “You Pay for Your Life with Your Life”: James Baldwin’s Search for Jimmy Baldwin, 1969–1972 / Ed Pavlić  534. Beauford Delaney’s Black Queer Fatherhood / Magdalena J. Zaborowska  66II. Synesthesia and Arts in Dialogue5. Blue(s) as Cymbal: Beauford Delaney (Elvin Jones) James Baldwin / Fred Moten  796. Baldwin and Delaney: Yellows and Blues / Robert G. O’Meally  987. Chiaroscuro, Delaney’s Aesthetic Vision, and Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” / D. Quentin Miller  1198. Yellow Light, Black Abstraction: Jazz, Writing, and Ethical Shattering in Baldwin’s and Delaney’s Works / Walton M. Muyumba  1319. Baldwin/Delaney/Cazac / Nicholas Boggs  14610. Singed Innocence: Baldwin, Delaney, and the Problematic Black Child / Robert F. Reid-Pharr  160III. Visibility, Performance, Abstraction11. Baldwin and Delaney: The Politics and Performance of Black Sight / Indie A. Choudhury  17112. Shared Subjects / Rachel Cohen  18713. Choosing Both: Abstraction and Singularity in Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin / Monika Gehlewat  19714: “Architects of the Spirit”: Color and Intimacy in Beauford Delaney’s Post-1950 Abstractions / Abbe Schriber  20815. Feeling Modernist: Beauford Delaney’s Self-Portrait (1944) / Levi Prombaum  22416. “The Giacometti Effect”: Reconsidering Beauford Delaney’s 1966 Portrait Bust of James Baldwin / Stephen C. Wicks  240IV. Continuing Influence17. Queer Radiance: Beauford Delaney at the Bathhouse / Tyler T. Schmidt  25118. Baldwin, Delaney, and Black Artists’ Genealogical Legacies / Shawn Anthony Christian  26619. In a Speculative Light: The Portrait Project / Jered Sprecher  278Bibliography  289Contributors  309IndexPlate Credits