Baldwin's (Afro)pessimism: Another Country as a "Colonized and Acculturated Society"

Approaching the concerns of 1960s race critics through the lens of Afropessimism, I argue for reading James Baldwin's Another Country (1962) as an early text engaging Blackness as a nonhuman, nonontological existence alongside Franz Fanon's 1952 Black Skin, White Masks. Rufus's "relation"to the other characters - and the relationship between book one and books two and three - is what Afropessimists call an antagonism. The novel's failure to cohere is the refusal of an analogy that would render its singular Black male as a human alongside the human life he enables while also refusing the instrumentalization that would deny him existence. Representing what Hortense J. Spillers describes as the "severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire,"Another Country renders Rufus a slave by problematizing the relationship between Black male desire and employment in a racially integrated novel under conditions of domination. Another Country's structure is split between the final days and death of one Black man and the lives of the white friends who survive him. Integrating the depiction of Black existence and queer being into a single novel, Another Country stages the antagonism between the queer humanism central to Baldwin's early essays and novels and Black "humanity"in, to use Fanon's words, a "colonized and acculturated society."