Back in America

America is a possibility. It is a hope for an approach to a global community that exists in proximity, that values freedom, that understands how important interdependence is. It is convenient and easy to urge us all to move on. Every effort to move on will nevertheless remain haunted by the memory of a certain crime against humanity we'd love to pretend to be innocent in relationship to. Slavery is an extreme manifestation of a very American way of mismanaging power.

If we don't learn other ways of managing power, we're doomed to keep repeating it. If you're tired of arguing with strangers on the internet, try talking with one of them in real life.

Welcome to Back in America, the podcast. Professor Wallace, Maurice Wallace, thank you very much for being here with us in the Back in America podcast. Thank you for having me. And I have been looking forward to our conversation for some time. My name is Maurice Wallace. I am one of the faculty members in the Department of English at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. I have been in this profession, which is in some ways not just a job, it is a calling of mine for almost 30 years. So 2025 marks the 30th year of my participation in this profession.

I teach in the English department with concentrations in 19th and 20th century African-American literature. I also am very interested in 19th century American literature writ large. I have some even specialized interest in early photographic technologies and reputation in the 19th century. Since photography as a technology unfolds and matures alongside enslavement and emancipation in the United States, the intersection of those two phenomena, the political and the technological, are of deep interest to me. My most recent book, though, which I imagined was going to be a book about the photograph and the figure of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., somehow became a book not on photography or the visual at all, but a book about Martin Luther King Jr. and the sound of his voice. I recognized that all of the photographic images of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I was interested in were images of King holding forth,

images of King preaching, images of King on a public platform. And it came to me that what these images wanted more than anything was to be heard. And so suddenly my focus was no longer on the visual, but rather on the audio graphic. What you call the Black Modernist soundscape. Yes, the Black Modernist soundscape, which is a combination of what is both spoken and sung, as well as what is heard by Black Moderns, by Black American persons in the 20th century who are coming to a certain kind of new relationship to the nation at the same time that the nation understands itself to be becoming modern. I'm sure you could say a lot more because I've done some research, Professor Wallace, and I must say that you've been extremely prolific.

And we are going to be talking about Black literature. We are going to be talking about James Baldwin. We are going to be talking about Black American vernacular. You will be talking about this Black soundscape, Modernist soundscape. I want also to make time to talk about the slavery, because as you said, you've been studying that. Maybe we will be able to finish with the Black experience in America. So we have a lot to cover. I want to start by saying that I got introduced to you during an exhibit you did with your student at Rutgers, an exhibit on the centennial of James Baldwin.

And my first question to you is, I saw that you have a very special relationship, a very direct relationship with your student. The student I saw on that day seemed to really love this interaction. What do you think surprised most your student when they discover what you have to teach them about Black American literature? That's a great question. What surprises them most? My effort is always to demonstrate to my students that what they are reading about is both historical and contemporary. Which is to say that I hope they appreciate what we think of in the field as the changing that dynamics of power and difference are still with us. And are part of a continuous dynamic that is at least as old as the 19th century, the 18th century and more. So I think the surprise, if there is any, is that this material, which dates to a much earlier time than they have ever had reason to think of in any direct ways, is actually much closer to us than they know.

So the surprise is time. That a hundred years ago, in the large scheme of things, isn't that long at all. I hope they get that. I hope they get that. Talking about James Baldwin, I read that Baldwin profoundly impacted your understanding of the Black experience when you were an undergraduate. I want to talk about that experience when it relates to you and also what you think of Baldwin's impact on the civil rights movement. Yes, thank you for asking that question. It allows me to acknowledge Baldwin as a kind of antecedent for me, a kind of model and a kind of muse for me, even now. I was an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and I thought at the time that my professional aspirations would take me to architectural design. But I very shortly realized that I was not built for architectural design exactly. At the same time, I was taking composition classes, having enjoyed writing for some time, never imagining writing or teaching as a kind of professional career. Coming from a working class community, it seemed important to aspire toward careers that would not only earn a good living financially, but also bring with it a kind of public respectability.

I had not imagined that, but I was introduced to Baldwin by a composition teacher, liked something about my writing, and thought that I would be helped by reading Baldwin. It wasn't even on her syllabus, but she introduced it to me. His essay, Notes of a Native Son, blew me away because I identified so strongly with it. Here is a writer writing about his own upbringing in Harlem in a very religious family. I was not formed in Harlem, but I was part of a religious upbringing. I identified with that text, identified with the fraught father-son relationship at the time, and I identified with what it meant to be a Black subject in a larger White society. And the rest is history. I came to this profession because of James Baldwin, largely.

I was only going to say wanting to emulate and think with the breadth and sophistication that Baldwin does. Excuse me. So being French, I think many of us in France are aware of James Baldwin. We know that he settled in the south of France. So he was not foreign to me. How would you say Americans, especially White Americans, see Baldwin or know Baldwin? I think Baldwin was a major national presence during the Civil Rights Movement or the Black Freedom Struggles in the 1960s. He was back and forth between New York and Paris at that time.

He called himself a transatlantic commuter. But he was in the United States enough and public enough that he probably came to mind in the United States as one of a half dozen major civil rights spokespersons. He was probably the most prolific as a writer, but he had a public image. Since the 1960s and since his death in 1987, Baldwin is familiar mostly to the college educated, though not exclusively. I say that because Baldwin's writings, his essays, are often used in writing courses and many students get introduced to it as freshmen or sophomores. In the way that I did, only most are offered his essays as models for good writing. I took his writings to be models for progressive thinking and have been inspired by his essays and novels ever since. This is not to deny that there aren't whole communities of people, Black people in particular, who read Baldwin apart from any college curriculum or any educational curriculum at all.

If the question is about white American familiarity with Baldwin, I think it comes mostly with white American progressives and to some degree white American liberals who have been exposed to him, have encountered him in some classroom setting or some educational or semi-educational setting of one sort or another. Why did you say that Baldwin is the missing subject of American civil rights history? I think when we think about the most popular images and figures and spokespersons for the Black civil rights movement or the Black freedom movement in the United States, the two figures that come to mind because they are often thought of as oppositional figures are Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. I just want to say that Baldwin, perhaps because he was a transatlantic commuter, perhaps because so many of his most robust ideas were on paper or in interviews, that if we're not also reading as much as we are looking for and listening to platform speeches, then we might miss Baldwin's, his brilliance, his genius, his very penetrating commitment to truth telling. He's not the only forgotten figure, I should add. He is certainly one of them.

But I think I have, if I've not learned anything else since reading and learning and researching the Black civil rights movement, there are any number of women figures also who tend to be overlooked in our reductive thinking about the Black civil rights movement or Black freedom movement, as I prefer. They tend to get overlooked because we think in very binary ways. We think of only King and his non-violence platform that we identify with him and Malcolm, then more radical understanding or seemingly radical understanding of Black power and its manifestations in our collective struggle. Yeah. Okay. So maybe as a transition to Black American vernacular, if we stick to Baldwin, I read that you think of Baldwin as an oral experience. Yes. One of the reasons that Baldwin was so important to me and one of the reasons that his essays and novels, The Fire Next Time being a long essay, brilliant. Go Tell It On The Mountain being his first novel,

Just Above My Head being his last novel published in 1979. One of the reasons that they are so compelling to me and one of the reasons I identify with them has everything to do with style and rhythm. And the style and rhythm of Baldwin's very long sentences are meaningful to me and memorable to me because they are part of a rhythm of Black cultural life, a rhythm of Black religious, Black Protestant cultural life that was just very familiar to me. So when I read Baldwin and not just Baldwin, Morrison is another great example of this. Gail Jones is another great example of this.

One reads with one's ears as much as one reads with one's eyes. If you can imagine that words on the page are but approaches to sound, then you have a different reading experience. When I say that Baldwin is an oral writer, an oral figure, I mean to suggest that his writing, his speech making in order to be most fully appreciated must be heard. Not only his individual genius in hearing that voice, but you'll find a kind of broad cultural inheritance that helps you understand why Baldwin is such an exciting writer and recorder of Black cultural life for so many Black Americans, I think. There's something about the sound of his writing, the tempo of his writing, the timbre of his writing,

the rhythms. Baldwin was exceedingly fond of commas. His sentences were two, three, four, five lines and yet they worked because he knew where to interpose a comma in order to make the sentence feel heard and rhythmic. He's a fantastically oral essayist and novelist. So when you talk about Black modernist soundscape, it sounds to me that this is what you're describing here in the way he writes. You talk about the influence and you mentioned that earlier on of the church architecture, the acoustic, the musical instrumentation, the pipe organ. How does that all come to become a figure of styles?

I think it's important that we think of the soundscape as not a single sound or a single tone or a single mood, but a constellation of sounds. I like to think of it as an ecology of sounds and those sounds are the acoustic features of our modern life, which is to say that we should consider that our historical moment might be identified not only by politicians, not only by a certain kind of economics, not only by the culture wars, but we can imagine that our historical moment is also identifiable by the sounds around us, the sounds that surround us. So I live in New York and I live a couple of blocks from a hospital.

And so there's a way in which when I am in New York, I know I'm in New York in the 21st century and in 2024 and 2025 because of the sound of the ambulances racing by my apartment. And those sounds those sirens are slightly different sirens than the sirens I might have heard when I was 15 years old. So what I'm suggesting is we can listen very attentively if we have good ears. We can almost identify where we are and what historical time we occupy by what we hear. That's the soundscape. Baldwin's 20th century soundscape, his hearing of music, his hearing of preaching, his experience of acoustics in a storefront church and not a cathedral is a meaningful acoustic difference that helped him understand something about percussive sounds, for example,

coming out of the Pentecostal storefront tradition within which percussive sounds often predominate the musical and preacherly sensibilities. To attend to those sounds and to bring them into one's literary sensibility, one's writing sense and style is to give space for those inherited sounds on the page and to transport us to those places, to those times. I hope I've answered the question, but let me suggest that if I follow you, my understanding is that those sounds are then translated into the rhythm of a sentence. Yes, they can be certainly. And I think, you know, most of my writing about the soundscape pertains to Martin Luther King Jr's speech making and writing but the same can be said about Baldwin. They share different styles, different sensibilities,

but they share a way in which the sound of their lives, their young and adult lives, find their way into their writing. Martin Luther King Jr religious upbringing was not in a storefront church at all, but in a larger modernist European style church in the American South, not in Harlem, but in Atlanta. His sense of sound, his voice, and the pace of speech and the pace of writing is much slower, maybe even darker than Baldwin's sort of performative speech making, but that I think has a lot to do with the sound. King's mother was an organist. Her organ playing, I think as much as his father's preaching influenced his style. Baldwin's last novel was just above my head and it's about a traveling gospel quartet and the rhythms of

that early gospel sounds, they're in the novel too. So it's not just about gospel, it's written with the gospel sense about it, with gospel rhythms, and it's brilliant that way. So let's look at what is black American vernacular. And honestly, when I read Baldwin, I can see some element of that, but it's not as clear as when you listen to today's hip hop example.

How do you define black American and how do you make a case for it being part of our culture? So I think one of the things it's important to note is that language is always changing and that what sounds like black vernacular in 2025 is likely to be a different hearing than say 1955. So one reason why it may be more difficult to find the vernacular, to hear the vernacular in Baldwin may have to do with just the natural evolution of language. And in American speech, there's something about the creativity of black speech and improvisations of black speech on standard American, so-called standard American speech that is so engaging to Americans of all sorts, that it is often the case that black vernacular practices

find their way into the wider sphere of public life and speech making. Just as an example of how far black vernacular travels, I'll mention the word, but I won't say anything more about it because it would derail our conversation. The word is woke. Woke has its origins in black vernacular culture. Black vernacular culture is black expressive speech. Its intentions are not necessarily transactional in the way that you can argue so-called standard American speech is. You could say it's expressive. You could say part of the pleasure of it is that it is creative. It is improvisational, that it is also changing the rules, challenging the rules of standard speech practices in the interest of creating something else,

in the interest of creating something more interesting, more expressive, more life-giving, I think. American speech holds a great deal to black vernacular speech. I'm often on campus doing double takes when I hear white students using black vernacular speech and using it comfortably. It's just a part of the popular culture. It doesn't surprise me all the time, but occasionally it requires me to do a double speech because I hadn't realized that a certain word or a certain expression or a certain style or a certain inflection had already found its way into the larger public sphere. Are you okay with that, with white person using black American speech? That's a great question. I think it's generational. I think there's a degree

to which my students, my white students, have been formed by black American hip hop, by black rap, by black vernacular speech, therefore. It is not unnatural. It's not foreign. It's not some exotic thing for them. Whereas white Americans in my generation, maybe your generation, we might share same generation. I don't know, but it's less comfortable because it's a performance of rather than what their linguistic and cultural formation has been. Make total sense to me. Professor Wallace, I suggest we move on to the question of slavery. I've read that you said that it is critically important to understand slavery, to understand what's happening today with the black experience as a whole. Can you say more

because a lot of white persons saying we need to move on. We hear that too. I think it is convenient and easy to ask or to urge us all to move on, but it would never, to move on resolves nothing. Every effort to move on will nevertheless remain haunted by the memory of a certain crime against humanity we'd love to pretend to be innocent in relationship to, which is to say that experience of absolute power and control racialized in the interest of economy, in the interest of power is a thing that doesn't ever go away if it is not addressed, which is also to say one of my friends and colleagues at Columbia, Saidiya Hartman, famously now, has called the history of emancipation the non-event of emancipation, which is to say that

the difference between slavery and freedom in the middle of the 19th century and thereafter is a difference in semantics, but not experience, a difference in language, but not the structures of living and working so that the dynamics of power that slavery models is dehumanizing. It is violent. It is cruel exercises of power and oppression that might be rendered illegal, no longer permissible legally, politically, morally, but if we don't learn other ways of relating to one another, if we don't learn other ways of managing power, then we will inevitably repeat those dynamics under a different name. And what I'm suggesting to you is that slavery is an extreme manifestation of a very American way of mismanaging power. And we're doomed

to keep repeating it. We're doomed to keep dehumanizing, objectifying, exploiting, and otherwise demeaning people of particular classes because we refuse to acknowledge Americans' capability to be so inhumane, to be so violent, to be so cruel. It is not just that Americans in the 21st century can be cruel, can be violent. It is that we have been as Americans, or certain classes of Americans have been violent, systemically violent, cruel, dehumanizing, all out of a sense of power, of an intoxication with power, I guess. Not just that, but in the interest of personal, political, racialized ambition. I want to touch on two things. I want to touch on mass incarceration and your experience when you were working on your book

of photography, US slavery is after life. What struck you when you were working on that? I think it's worth underscoring how technologies participate in our struggles for or against freedom, that all sorts of technologies are complicit in the political crises that face us. One could say very easily, I think, that social media as a technology is very much at the center of our political crisis in the moment. As we speak, there are more Americans than ever who get their news from social media, and there's an algorithm that determines what kind of news we get. Photography, similarly, in the 19th century, was for and against black emancipation. Black subjects themselves, Frederick Douglass in particular,

had a great deal of faith in photography's capacity to correct misrepresentations of black American people, black American people who'd been caricatured and deformed and misrepresented, not so much in photography all the time, but on performance stages, especially within the blackface minstrel tradition. Blackface minstrelsy, of course, was perhaps the most popular American pastime in its age, in the 19th century, in the middle to late 19th century, even into the 20th century, where black Americans are represented as anti-modern or incapable of being modern, of clowns, comedic, having no capability for intellectual reasonable conversation or discussion, backwards, and just any stereotype about black Americans that could be imagined get

exaggerated and performed on minstrel stages. But Douglass used photography, a thought of photography, as having the possibility of a corrective. And he sat for probably hundreds of photographs himself, always with an aim toward representing black dignity, respectability, and to help the nation see that black Americans were already sort of, to help the nation see black Americans as part of the body politics, as respectable citizens who could be- So it's what each response of size. Yes, yes. It changes the narrative. Photography changed the narrative about black Americans. But of course, it could also be used against black American struggles as well. There's a

famous Harvard scientist named Louis Agassiz, who commissioned photographs of enslaved people in South Carolina. He undressed them. He made them pose nude and semi-nude in order to represent them as anthropological subjects. And he put these images forward among the scientific class as self-evident proof that Africans and Europeans descended from different origins. And somehow these images were taken by his colleagues and those others who would be sympathetic to his position were taken to be like scientific evidence. Now, you and I would look at those same images and we couldn't draw any conclusions that are scientific at all. But he performed science by having them undress. He performed science by having them taking

images of the same figure in a frontal position, in profile, from the rear, as if to make of these people scientific objects. And almost as soon as he makes them scientific objects, it seems clear to him and his colleagues that these objects could not have descended, could not have come from the same origins as the scientists, the European scientists themselves. So here's a case where photography is working against Black freedom and Douglas has committed to photography as a way of proving Black respectability. So there is a parallel here between what happened with the emancipation that never already happened. Exactly. Photographs being used on one hand to show the humanity of Black person and then on the other hand to construct a narrative of an inferior race.

Yes. And I want to come back to the discussion that was slavery and what's happening today and the importance of understanding slavery to understand the Black experience today. And I want you to talk to us about mass incarceration and the parallel that you are drawing there. Well, the parallel is not even constructed by me. It is part of the political inheritance of emancipation and the abolition of slavery, which is to say that the 13th Amendment, which, of course, establishes that slavery is not to be countenanced in the country, ends with a kind of loophole, which is to say that the Constitution does not allow for any person to be forced into free labor except those who have been convicted of crimes. So you

can imagine how then criminalization of Black bodies becomes an economic necessity for some Southern folks who, without their enslaved laborers, cannot produce and sell their crops and maintain their economic standing and their social standing so that there's a loophole there. And the criminalization of Black bodies has been a problem ever since. Mass incarceration then is the fulfillment, as it were, or the exploitation of that loophole itself a profitable undertaking. It is the warehousing, even Baldwin would call it that, I think, the warehousing of Black bodies, especially when the country doesn't otherwise know what to do with these bodies. When the country feels threatened by these bodies. So, you know,

mass incarceration is in fact its own mission, its own objective. It's not rehabilitation. Rehabilitation is not as profitable as warehousing Black bodies. I encourage your listeners, if you're interested in mass incarceration, to pick up a book by Michelle Alexander called The New Jim Crow. It is probably the last word on this subject. I guess by the last word, I really mean the most foundational text, the most informative text to help us see how mass incarceration evolved into the problem it is today. And it's only a problem for freedom loving people. It's not a problem for capitalists. It is a boon for capitalists, but it has the effect of exercising another kind of absolute control over Black and Brown bodies, which for

some curious reason, the nation has always feared. I say it's a curious reason, but it's not terribly curious. It's almost obvious, which is to say that the fear that history might turn the tables on some is a real fear. And I'll just leave it at that. Thank you. I'm conscious of time. We are only scrapping the surface. Yes. I've got two more questions before I let you go. The first one would be, what would you like to leave our audience with? What would you like people to think about or to know? I would love people to return to reading Baldwin seriously and deeply, read his essays. They couldn't

be any more relevant than they are today. The more things change, the more they stay the same, which is why so many people think of a figure like Baldwin as prophetic. Baldwin himself would say, I'm not a prophet. I'm a witness. I'm telling you what I see, but I'm telling you what I see in a way that is motivated and driven by truth seeking and nothing else. I think that is worth returning to. And I urge your listeners not only to read, but to make a commitment to the higher values of ourselves as modern people, not just in America, but in the world. What book would you recommend starting with? The Fire Next Time. The Fire Next Time, long essay in 1962, begins with a letter to his nephew

on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, at the end of which Baldwin concludes that America, while it is celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation 100 years later, is actually celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation 100 years too soon, because that emancipation has yet to happen. It is, in the words of my colleague, Professor Hartman, the non-event of emancipation. Okay. What is America to you?

America is a possibility. It is a hope for an approach to a global community that exists in proximity, that values freedom, that understands how important interdependence is. It is the imagined hope of mutual respect, regard, dignity, and the high aspirations of peace and justice and fairness, all driven by a politics of love and neighborliness. That's the best I can do.

That's my ending. Professor Wallat, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for having me.

Thank you.