Meeting at the Watchtower: Eldridge Cleaver, James Baldwin's No Name in the Street, and Racializing Homophobic Vernacular
@article{ManditchProttas2019MeetingAT, title={Meeting at the Watchtower: Eldridge Cleaver, James Baldwin's No Name in the Street, and Racializing Homophobic Vernacular}, author={Zachary Manditch-Prottas}, journal={African American Review}, year={2019}, volume={52}, pages={179 - 195} }
In his prison-time memoir Soul on Ice, Eldridge Cleaver, Black Power ideologue provocateur, attacked the racial authenticity and manhood of perhaps the most acclaimed and accomplished African American author of the decade, James Baldwin. Cleaver’s critical aim was Baldwin’s personal sexual practices and corresponding racial psychology, not his prose. Cleaver asserted that Baldwin’s sexuality was, in essence, the manifestation of a “racial death-wish” (101). He argued that Baldwin’s sexuality…
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