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Speculative Light

The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin

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Book

Pages: 352

Illustrations: 57 illustrations, including 33 in color

Published: February 2025

Editor: Amy J. Elias

Contributors: David Leeming, Hilton Als, Ed Pavlic, Magdalena J. Zaborowska, Fred Moten, Robert O’Meally, D. Quentin Miller, Walton Muyumba, Nicholas Boggs, Robert Reid-Pharr, Indie A. Choudhury, Rachel M. Cohen, Monika Gehlewat, Abbe Schriber, Levi Prombaum, Stephen C. Wicks, Tyler T. Schmidt, Shawn Anthony Christian, Jered Sprecher

Over the course of a thirty-eight-year friendship, painter Beauford Delaney and writer James Baldwin shared their private lives and shaped one another’s artistic values. Speculative Light brings together scholars, critics, and artists who analyze the stylistic and historical import of Delaney's and Baldwin’s works and examine how this friendship fundamentally shaped the pair's ideas about art and life. The book’s contributors explore how the two men, sharing identities as queer Black American artists, first in New York and then as expatriates in France, created a speculative space in their work to think about more just and creative Black futures. Essay topics and issues range from masculinity, queerness, Blackness, and Americanness to the relationship between jazz, painting, and writing. Throughout, the contributors establish a positive history for Delaney's and Baldwin’s arts that refuses a subordinate role to white artists of the modernist avant-garde. Ultimately, Speculative Light demonstrates that Delaney and Baldwin's bond provides revolutionary grounds for theorizing contemporary Black art and life.

Contributors. Hilton Als, Nicholas Boggs, Indie A. Choudhury, Shawn Anthony Christian, Rachel Cohen, Amy J. Elias, Monika Gehlawat, David Leeming, D. Quentin Miller, Fred Moten, Walton M. Muyumba, Robert O’Meally, Ed Pavlić, Levi Prombaum, Robert Reid-Pharr, Tyler T. Schmidt, Abbe Schriber, Jered Sprecher, Stephen C. Wicks, Magdalena Zaborowska

Praise

“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

"The book is valuable to anyone curious about the interplay between different genres of writing (fiction vs. nonfiction) or styles of painting (abstraction vs. realism), as well as the cross-pollination between different forms of artistic expression." - Reginald Harris, Gay & Lesbian Review

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Information

Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

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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.

Table Of Contents

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List of Illustrations  xiii
Acknowledgments  xvii
Introduction. Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin / Amy J. Elias  1
I. Circuits of Selfhood
1. Jimmy and Beauford: The Bond of the Unusual Door / David Leeming  39
2. The Mentor: James Baldwin, Beauford Delaney, and the Habit of Doing / Hilton Als  50
3. “You Pay for Your Life with Your Life”: James Baldwin’s Search for Jimmy Baldwin, 1969–1972 / Ed Pavlić  53
4. Beauford Delaney’s Black Queer Fatherhood / Magdalena J. Zaborowska  66
II. Synesthesia and Arts in Dialogue
5. Blue(s) as Cymbal: Beauford Delaney (Elvin Jones) James Baldwin / Fred Moten  79
6. Baldwin and Delaney: Yellows and Blues / Robert G. O’Meally  98
7. Chiaroscuro, Delaney’s Aesthetic Vision, and Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” / D. Quentin Miller  119
8. Yellow Light, Black Abstraction: Jazz, Writing, and Ethical Shattering in Baldwin’s and Delaney’s Works / Walton M. Muyumba  131
9. Baldwin/Delaney/Cazac / Nicholas Boggs  146
10. Singed Innocence: Baldwin, Delaney, and the Problematic Black Child / Robert F. Reid-Pharr  160
III. Visibility, Performance, Abstraction
11. Baldwin and Delaney: The Politics and Performance of Black Sight / Indie A. Choudhury  171
12. Shared Subjects / Rachel Cohen  187
13. Choosing Both: Abstraction and Singularity in Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin / Monika Gehlewat  197
14: “Architects of the Spirit”: Color and Intimacy in Beauford Delaney’s Post-1950 Abstractions / Abbe Schriber  208
15. Feeling Modernist: Beauford Delaney’s Self-Portrait (1944) / Levi Prombaum  224
16. “The Giacometti Effect”: Reconsidering Beauford Delaney’s 1966 Portrait Bust of James Baldwin / Stephen C. Wicks  240
IV. Continuing Influence
17. Queer Radiance: Beauford Delaney at the Bathhouse / Tyler T. Schmidt  251
18. Baldwin, Delaney, and Black Artists’ Genealogical Legacies / Shawn Anthony Christian  266
19. In a Speculative Light: The Portrait Project / Jered Sprecher  278
Bibliography  289
Contributors  309
Index
Plate Credits

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Sales/Territorial Rights: World

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Additional Information

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Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3005-8 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-2487-3 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-5904-2 / DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478059042