Bill Lyne
Published almost exactly halfway between James Baldwin’s first book ( Go Tell It on the Mountain ) and his last ( The Evidence of Things Not Seen ), No Name in the Street stands as the fulcrum of Baldwin’s career. The initial reception of the book was overwhelmingly hostile and marked the beginning of the critical orthodoxy that Baldwin’s career was bifurcated between a commitment to a universalist aesthetics and a descent into bitter propaganda. This essay will examine No Name in the Street , its initial critical reception, and the more recent reconsiderations of the book to situate Baldwin and his career in several critical conversations. An examination of the underpinnings of the art versus propaganda argument (stretching back to the Enlightenment) invokes the intertwined inventions and histories of aesthetics and race, which helps us to a deeper understanding of what Baldwin means when he says at the end of No Name in the Street that “the Western party is over.” The essay will then attempt to describe a radical consistency in Baldwin’s career and use No Name in the Street to examine the cooptation of Baldwin by contemporary writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates.