Otherwise Charisma: James Baldwin and the Black Queer Archive of Civil Rights Historiography

Throughout the 1960s, charisma emerged as a keyword in US racial and sexual discourse, connoting the dazzling personality of the straight, macho head men who ruled white politics, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Black Power. In this essay, I argue that James Baldwin’s oeuvre proffers a contemporaneous body of radical black queer thought that theorizes charisma otherwise. Deploying close readings of Baldwin’s profile of Martin Luther King Jr. (1961) as well as Just above My Head (1978) and an essay on Lorraine Hansberry (1979), I show how Baldwin’s writing pivots from the trope of the charismatic leader to a theory of the charismatic group, withholding a singular central figure in favor of a horizontal vision of charisma as communal affect. I suggest that Baldwin’s archive strategically rethinks and queers black charismatic leadership at a time when the white mainstream hoped for the demise of black charisma, and when the Black Power movement expected a certain level of straightness from its members. I situate the later Baldwin as a writer who queers the historiography of the (post)–civil rights era years before queer studies takes up this task. In so doing, I suggest, Baldwin remakes the civil rights era into an alternative usable past, one that has been widely taken up within the antiracist and abolitionist activism of the Black Lives Matter era.