My dissertation, “More Like a Fire, Like the Wind,” explores how Black American culture, philosophy, and religion have contributed to love’s history, theorization, and politics worldwide. Focusing on James Baldwin in particular, I combine close reading, philosophy, and discourse analysis to outline the multiparty philosophical discourse on love, religion, and politics that emerged from James Baldwin’s conversations with other Black intellectuals. answers the question: “What role has James Baldwin played in conversations about love and politics in the 20th century?” To answer this question, I draw upon two recent academic trends. Firstly, I build upon Black feminist scholars’ arguments that the sociopolitical circumstances of African Americans have inspired singular understandings of the definition and political function of love. Secondly, I employ “critical love analysis,” a methodological framework that reads discussions of love as extended narratives about acts of care and intimacy. Using these frameworks, I examine Baldwin’s political philosophy of “active love,” which held that concrete acts of love could foster significant personal, political, and ethical change amidst the worst social conditions. As I show, the philosophy unfolded through James Baldwin’s conversations with other twentieth-century Black creative intellectuals – namely Ralph Ellison, Eldridge Cleaver, and Audre Lorde. The project joins Black studies’ growing conversations about love by outlining Baldwin’s singular understanding of the phenomenon. I read Baldwin’s treatments of love as and through the language of testimony – a form of discourse that asserts universal truths by drawing upon the ambiguities of concrete, contextual experience. As I show, the poetics of testimony allowed Baldwin to use critical reflections on Black liberation to demonstrate love’s transformative potential in all racial contexts. In doing so, Baldwin simultaneously defined love as a radical political act, highlighted its antiracist functions, and addressed love’s operation in all human lives. I use this analysis to argue that scholars adopt testimony to study love within and outside Black studies. Because African American testimonies have roots in the Christian church, the discourse is highly spiritual. As a result, I pay particular attention to how the discourse’s religiosity both shapes and is shaped by public attitudes toward Black people and Blackness. The project is highly interdisciplinary. It engages classic and recent scholarship from several fields, including hermeneutics, political theology, political theory, American literary history, philosophy of religion, comparative literature, Black studies, philosophy, and African American Christianity. I have received grants for my dissertation from the University of Chicago Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, the University of Chicago Center for Study of Gender and Sexuality, the University of Notre Dame, Carleton College, and the Consortium for Faculty Diversity
