James Baldwin, Time’s Witness

James Baldwin, Time’s Witness reevaluates of the work of Baldwin through philosophical and aesthetic categories, placed in dialogue with canonical thinkers and texts in critical theory. Mikko Tuhkanen provides a substantial rethinking of James Baldwin’s place in 20th-century thought in the USA and Europe. He considers the writer as an experimenter of onto-ethics/aesthetics in order to show that when Baldwin speaks of ethics or politics, he consistently returns to an ontological description which he develops across decades, and that this ontology is always linked to the question of aesthetics in his work.Tuhkanen situates Baldwin’s thought not only in the context of his immediate influences and interlocutors – Henry James, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, Toni Morrison, American ego-psychology, the New York School of Abstract Expressionism – but also that of other 20th-century thinkers in Europe and the USA. Like these thinkers, Baldwin tackles the paradoxes of Western modernity that became inescapable after the catastrophes of the two World Wars. Taking a philosophical approach, James Baldwin, Time's Witness profoundly redefines Baldwin’s place in 20th-century thought.This study will be of interest to researchers in literary studies, modernism, African-African literature, critical theory and the intersections of literature and philosophy.