Joseph Vogel is one of the finest writers on music (Michael Jackson, Prince), so I was overjoyed to see he'd written on a favorite writer of mine, James Baldwin. I will read anything by Vogel.

James Baldwin is such an important historical figure, but often overlooked. I have read some of Baldwin's work and absolutely loved it, which made me want to know him as a man more. This book does a wonderful job of filling in the blanks of Baldwin's life and impact.

James Baldwin has always been a fascinating figure to me. His prose is brutally honest, and unforgiving. His stories are heartbreaking, yet I feel soothed and whole after spending time with his words. "Witnessing the Reagan Era" is an examination of his work in the 1980s, particularly his last novel, "Just Above My Head." The Reagan Era was characterized by an antidote to the malaise of the Carter administration, a new awakening for America, a land of endless possibility. Baldwin's is rooted in his own experience, where opportunities are more available to some than to others. The promise of the 1980s was particularly elusive to the black community, and Baldwin's work shows the complications of reaching the American Dream, particularly for a young, black, gay man.

Thanks to NetGalley and the University of Illinois Press for the opportunity to read and review this work.

This book was deep and not at all within my usual remit but I found it fascinating and so true. I had so many light bulb moments exclaiming out to myself in wonder, asking how I hadn't figured things for myself. This is such a sharp read. While Baldwin examined with extreme clarity the flaws and faults he recognised in his usual sphere of the civil rights movement, the inequalities he witnessed as a gay black man in the USA, he deals also, with absolute clarity, with "the great transforming energy" of mass culture and how it influenced all of society, This is a topic I intend to read so much more on and am excited about the prospect.

This book took me a while to read but I’m so glad that I kept going with it because it’s a fascinating read. I’ve read a couple of James Baldwin’s well-known books but I didn’t know as much about him and the context of when he was writing as I thought I did. This book covers sexuality, racism and the AIDS crisis all in the context of the 1980s and the political agenda of the time. I was fascinated by the chapter on AIDS and the play that Baldwin wrote that has never been published. The author brought this play, and the themes Baldwin was exploring, to life for me so whilst I might never get a chance to see or read this play I have an understanding of the work now. I was also fascinated by the chapter that focused on the Atlanta child murders. I’d heard about these murders from watching Mindhunter on Netflix but didn’t know anymore about it than that so I was appalled to read more of the background and aftermath of this case. I’ve now put Baldwin’s Evidence of Things Not Seen on my wish list and I think this will be the next book of his that I pick up. This is quite an academic book but it’s absolutely well worth a read, I recommend it!

I can't use this book in the course I'm currently teaching, but it's a wonderful resource that I hope to use with students in the future.

When most people think of James Baldwin they tend to think of the earlier work, written during the Civil Rights era. They tend to forget that Baldwin was alive and working during the Eighties. 'James Baldwin in the 80's', by Joseph Vogel, seeks to rectify this omission. This work looks at: the films which Baldwin wrote at this time; the books that make up his later oeuvre; and his attitudes towards the issues of the day, such as; AIDS, gay rights and race relations. It argues that Baldwin disregarded the dominant dichotomy between high and low culture, exploring the films which Baldwin made during the early Eighties. In addition, Vogel explores Baldwin's individuality, emphasizing his dual identity, being both; African American and gay. The author argues that these aspects of Baldwin's life, and work, make him a perfect inspiration for our post post modern, intersectional, age.

. . . . .

A vital contribution to contemporary understanding of a period bridging the end of the civil rights era and our current understanding of intersectional identities. Literature and political life come together uniquely in the life of James Baldwin, and his American experience illuminates our own lives and thoughts.

Summary: Baldwin continued to grow and think keeping into the 1980s. 

As someone born in the early 1970s, I am aware of the 1980s, I lived the 1980s, but I have not studied well the 1980s. James Baldwin and the 1980s was helpful, not just in better understanding James Baldwin, but helping me think about the 1980s as history.

Baldwin has become the historic voice of the Black Lives Matters moment. The new documentary I am Not Your Negro and the rise of Ta’Nehisi Coates means that book on Baldwin will get attention that they may not have previously. James Baldwin is mostly known for his earlier work. But he continued to write and teach and create into the 1980s.

James Baldwin and the 1980s has five chapter, each mostly focused on exploring one of the works that Baldwin created in the 1980s.

The most interesting part for me was the cultural/religious history of the 1980s in the 4th chapter. As someone that identifies as Christian and has been through seminary and reads about theology for fun, I am not sure that I agree with all of the assertions about the Religious Right and James Baldwin. But the important, and interesting part, is that this was written at all. I think that part of what is interesting to me is that the religious right got a significant amount of Christianity wrong. And I think that James Baldwin misunderstood Christianity, in a similar way, as many in the religious right.

His critique of televangelists and the moral majority I think has sway, not because it is wrong, but because it is at least partially right theologically. But I also think it is wrong in significant ways. As a Christian, I agree that the implicit racism of the Religious Right and the Moral Majority was contrary to Christ’s teachings. But I also think the his misunderstands part of the church’s teaching. Confining sex to marriage and monogamous relationships is not denying the body as the book, and Baldwin asserts, but a part of what it means to hold sexuality as sacred.

Baldwin was right to point out hypocrisy and right to point out how Black bodies in particular were viewed as problematic in ways that White bodies were not. But Christianity is for the body, just not for unfiltered access to all desires. Not all desires are good desires. Some desires should be repressed.Some desires are just wrong. My desires, especially if they are harmful to another are not good, but distorted. Your desires, if they are not primarily about empowering others, are likewise distorted.

The strength of James Baldwin and the 1980s is the broad cultural history and the particular exploration of Baldwin’s work during the 1980s. I do not think that Vogel or Baldwin got everything right. But it is important that they both identified hypocrisy, desire for power and money and the lack of concern for neighbors and the marginalized as particularly weaknesses of the White Evangelical world.

I was once a sociology and social work student. While I have not ever made the 1980s a particularly focus of my historical research, part of my schooling in both undergrad and graduate school was tracing the history of social work and sociology research. Both had a common narrative in the 1990s when I was an undergrad and then graduate student, ‘many things were wrong about government policy prior to the 1980s. But once Reagan came along, what was going well was stopped and what was wrong was increased.’ That is a too simplistic story. But not entirely wrong.

The cultural history discussion of the Reagan era, the return to masculinity exemplified by Reagan and the era, while a separate current of androgyny among culture makers (Boy George, Michael Jackson, David Bowie, etc) was also strengthening as just as important as the later discussion of the religious right. Again, I am not sure that the history is exactly correct. But the push back against the common narrative is important. Baldwin as an openly gay, Black man staring in the 1950s was countercultural to start with. The rise of the era of AIDS, which is handled very well, as well as the culturally conservative movement toward tradition in the midst of a continued countercultural movement was well narrated.

Baldwin was never completely home in the Gay community. That community was as racist as the heterosexual community. Baldwin’s escape to France was about both racism and attitudes toward homosexuality. Not that everything was perfect in Europe.

Two chapters are about things that I am basically ignorant about. The moment of black music from R&B to crossover and the Atlanta Child Murders. I am aware of some of the music of the era, but the politics and business of music is outside of my realm. But I was completely ignorant of the Atlanta Child Murders of ’78-’81. There were about 30 murders of mostly 9 to 15 year old African American boys. There were a couple of girls and a couple outside of the age range. Baldwin was asked to initially write an article about the murders and eventually wrote a book about them. I won’t detail the whole discussion, but what is important to the book was how the writing informs us today about Baldwin. The way that Baldwin interacts with the police and criminal justice system in the Atlanta Child Murders is connected to how Black Lives Matters has used Baldwin as an inspiration and influence.

Overall James and the Baldwin is a helpful, and relatively brief book about as aspect of Baldwin that I have not yet explored. All of my Baldwin reading has been from his earlier week. I will keep reading and this book has helped influence how I will understand Baldwin.

James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Reagan Era by Joseph Vogel Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition

4.5*

Vogel provides insight not only into James Baldwin's final years but also into the complexity of 80s politics and culture, a lot of which sowed the seeds of our present political landscape. Far from being past his prime, contends Vogel, Baldwin had his finger on the pulse of a reality that was widely glossed-over and purposely obfuscated during the greed and glory Reagan Era. Aside from that, I felt that I got a sense of Baldwin's personal life. This book was well-researched, thought-out and interesting to read. I highly recommend it.

<i>Thanks for NetGalley and University of Illinois Press for the eARC. All views are my own.</i>

This meticulously researched book does fill in a gap that other researchers have not as of yet written about, specifically the last decade of Baldwin's life and work. If students need this for research, this is a good source. As a straight read about Baldwin, however, I always think the best writer about Baldwin is Baldwin. The best thing about reading Baldwin is the personal transaction we have while thinking about what he is saying to us. That is not what this book is for.

James Baldwin and the 1980s
Witnessing the Reagan Era
by Joseph Vogel

University of Illinois Press


Biographies & Memoirs , Nonfiction (Adult)
Pub Date 16 Apr 2018



I am reviewing a copy of James Baldwin and the 1980's through University of Illinois Press and Netgalley:


How does James Baldwin apply to the 1980's after all the majority of his work was published in the Civil Rights era , but he remained a prolific writer until his death in 1987.


In 1979 Baldwin's book Just Above My Head hit the bookstores. A full year before the 1980's but the Reagan Revolution was already underway. Baldwin's book Just Above My Head stretches out over three decades from the 1940's to the later 1970's, but a great amount of the book takes place in the 1950's.


Many believe there is a correlation between the 1950's and 1980's. His books covered the affects of Popular culture and Mass Media in his many published works. He wrote about topics that those in generations before him would not have been able to.


I give James Baldwin and the 1980's five out of five stars.


Happy Reading!

The last decade of James Baldwin's career has not gotten the same attention as the preceding years. This book examines some of the most prevalent themes of Baldwin's work in the 80s. I would recommend you read his non-fiction books and essays, and his Playboy interviews, prior to reading this examination of his work.

Recommended for anyone with a brain, and who understands that everything currently happening in the USA is directly related to what's happened before economically, socially, and politically.

What can be said about James Baldwin? The man was a genius. Very complex man but held true to his beliefs and was not afraid to speak his mind. Very articulate speaker. This book takes us into the final years of this great man's work. This man work is valuable to us all. Thanks to Mr. Vogel for taking Mr. Baldwin's work and showing us how it still resounds in our day and time now. Very well written and a must for any fan of Mr. Baldwin's. Kudos to the author. Thank you kind sir for this wonderful book. Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for the ARC of this book in return for my honest review.

I will be honest, after dabbling with Baldwin through my initial read of 'Go Tell It on the Mountain' and having been inundated with myriad think pieces and Op-Eds in our current Baldwin revival, the man still remains a mystery to me. But it is very much like novelists and literary minds to write the first draft of the hermeneutics of our culture and politics.

I really enjoyed the way Vogel engages with each part of Baldwin's artistry - both books fiction and nonfiction, and plays - to make sense of his era's enigmatic black voice. On the one hand, for his ability to tap into the American zeitgeist, there was a pressure to throw on the cloak of direct activism. Yet on the other hand, Baldwin was gay, and dealt with the constant dissonance of how sexual ethics was conceived within the black community. Then, there were the string of assassinations of all who chose to spread the gospel of social equality, equity, civil rights, and the march to freedom. Baldwin had to weigh out not only how he could best dissect the surreptitious politics that disenfranchised black lives but also what form his voice would be most effectively received. In addition, he had to think about what it meant for him to simply live.

Vogel knits all of this pieces together to give us a very satisfying impression of a portrait of James Baldwin in relation to the progressivism of his time and to show us why his words have become especially poignant as our politics of sexuality continues to evolve (into what James Baldwin had always envisioned on the level of societal acceptance) and increasingly comprehensive understanding of systemic racism has continues to spread like a contagion, rescuing public consciousness from the lie that racism has been eradicated.

James Baldwin and the 1980s peers at few of Baldwin's articles and essays written around the eighties, examining its keys themes in the light of what is happening in the United States of America then and now.

WHO WOULD ENJOY READING IT?
Fans of James Baldwin's works should enjoy looking at this with fresh eyes.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT IT
The examination of the background of every essay is valuable in understanding Baldwin's thinking (in some cases) and the reason why he adopted a certain tone when addressing some section of United States's personalities.

MEMORABLE PASSAGE

"In sharp contrast to Fire, a national bestseller, however, Evidence—both upon publication and today—is likely his most overlooked book. To date, Evidence has been reprinted once, on its tenth anniversary in 1995, by Owl Books. At the time of its first publication, in spite of the nation’s abiding interest in the case, Baldwin found the book difficult to publish. His longtime publisher, Dial Press, passed it over. It was picked up in England and France before it finally found a home—and modest print run—in the United States via Holt, Rinehart and Winston. There are several possible reasons for this sudden indifference, perhaps most significant that the tone of Evidence was out of step with the 'colorblind,' optimistic ethos of the Reagan era. As David Leeming observes, “White people wanted to be told that the ‘new South,’ that the existence of black mayors and police chiefs in American cities, the presence of blacks as television anchors, and the emergence of black men and women as ‘successful’ authors, meant that the civil rights movement had worked and that America was on its way to ‘glory.’ Baldwin, always the Jeremiah, always the disturber of the peace, let it be known in Evidence that they were wrong.”

.......

James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Reagan Era by Joseph Vogel is available to buy from on all major online bookstores. Many thanks to University of Illinois Press for review copy.

First of all I love love love James Baldwin and this book is obviously about James Baldwin so it already meets a lot of my criteria for a good book.

This book is an attempt to combat the claim that Baldwin's latter works (so those from, as the title might suggest, the 1980s) were less relevant to his context and ours. To do this, the book identifies several key themes from the 1980s, matches a particular theme to one of Baldwin's works from the 1980s, and shows the ways in which Baldwin's work was in fact in a dialogue with these particular themes from the 1980s.

This book is obviously in service of a nobel cause, and it's really excellent for providing some contextual knowledge about America in the 1980s, Baldwin's works and Baldwin himself. I love it for that and I'm glad I have this knowledge. However, because this book, for me, largely served as a device to provide context, I was left kinda unsatisfied. I was left feeling as though this book wasn't as meaty or as detailed as I wanted it to be. Part of my problem was probably that I was unable to identify what literary niche this book fit in, so I was left unsure of what to expect from it. Again though, I'm still happy I read it even though I remain a bit unsatisfied.

James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Reagan Era by Joseph Vogel

I finished this book in one sitting. I was obsessively reading it. What Vogel does with this book is highlight certain works of Baldwin that was written in the late 1970s and the 1980s and juxtapose it with the events taking place at the time and some of the events taking place right now. There are five chapters in this book and each chapter deals specifically with one of Baldwin’s writings. From the impact and success of Black music, to androgyny and masculinity, to AIDS and the terror it caused, to the rise of the religious right and finally the murders that occurred in Atlanta of Black children.

This was an intense book. Vogel did an amazing job analyzing Baldwin’s work. What I really loved though was the way he was able to weave in so much of what was happening outside of Baldwin, in the community and in the United States as whole, so seamlessly into his analysis. Every chapter provided so much interesting information. The two chapters that stood out the most to me were chapters four and five. Both of these chapters were so relevant to today and so disturbing in their clarity, truth and position. I found myself shocked, appalled, and dismayed, in ways I hadn’t contemplated before reading this book.

Now that I’m done I honestly just want to read more of Baldwin’s work. I feel compelled to at this point after reading this book. He had so much to say that continues to be relevant. Vogel passionately brought this book together and I definitely thought this was well worth the read. I definitely recommend this book and hope others gain as much from it as I did.

“All of us are chasing Baldwin—even if we don’t know it.” ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

A distinguished American author, writer, social critic, James Baldwin (1924-1987) was the oldest of 9 children born in Harlem, N.Y.C.. Eventually he would move abroad, settle in France, and observe the distinct cultural differences he wrote about, as he taught and lectured at prominent American colleges and universities. “James Baldwin and The 1980’s: Witnessing The Reagan Era” written by Joseph Vogel is an important introduction to Baldwin’s religious, political, racial and cultural studies.

Cultural influence was easily manipulated by the media. President Ronald Reagan, the “great communicator” was first known as an actor in American Cowboy Western movies popular in the 1950’s-60’s. Reagan was celebrated and promoted as the ideal version of American manhood/masculinity (1980-88). Reagan was photographed at the white house with Michael Jackson, who sported an unusual military like uniform featuring high-water pants. The “freakish” differences between the two men were striking, and compared endlessly in the news media.
At the time Jackson hadn’t been acknowledged as the global phenomenon in black entertainment history he would become. Black entertainment was considered the “lower forms” of talent, music, movies etc. even as the work of Michael Jackson, Prince, Lionel Richie, Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson and later Eddie Murphy soared in popularity. Baldwin would despair in disillusionment over the tragic ending to so many black artists/professionals, entertainers: “The Price May Be Too High” (1969) in a white dominated industry. In Hollywood, the leading men were straight white men with glamourous white women: the racism, sexism and homophobia were glaringly apparent, according to Baldwin.

The most scathing criticism was reserved for the evangelical Christian church: Jerry Falwell’s Republican dominated Moral Majority through his Liberty University, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s PTL television Ministry with the enormous Disney Land Christian theme park, Pat Robertson’s 700 Club. These elite judgmental pastors knowingly lived in excessive wealth and luxury while so many of their followers lived in poverty. This (white) dominated Christianity; merged too closely with the popular media, conservative politics and capitalism—religion mass produced, packaged and sold. Christianity, Baldwin noted was “arrogant, intolerant and cruel.” though he recalled the celebratory style of the black churches he was raised in, his step-father was a minister.

Regarding the Atlanta Child Murders (1979-81) Baldwin noted that the guilty verdict of Wayne B. Williams believed to be responsible for all 28 deaths involving children, youth and young adults was false and inaccurate. Williams was actually linked and charged in only two murders. Public opinion was heavily influenced by Williams being racially profiled in the media as a “black gay man” and a “pedophile.” The black community had other ideas about possible suspects that didn’t include Wayne B. Williams. Curiously, the list of other suspects and possible affiliation through the KKK wasn’t fully investigated by authorities. There was a strong incentive and pressure by the police and prosecutors to “solve” the case, and Williams was an easy target and “Scapegoat” for all the child murders. If Williams wasn’t guilty of all these crimes, the actual murderers were never charged, the possibility of a cover-up is chilling as facts were likely changed, altered and/or distorted.

As a gay black man, Baldwin constantly reflected on the harsh and extreme differences between white America and black America. These differences could not be politely ignored. Baldwin, a visionary, realized with the loss of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, his voice was among the last of his generation to be heard; yet Baldwin’s powerful ideology remains with us today, represented in the increased interest and study of his writing and in the dignity and pride of Black Lives Matter. **With thanks and appreciation to the University of Illinois Press via NetGalley for the DDC for the purpose of review.