James Baldwin, Liberalism, and Survivor Guilt

Abstract This chapter traces the development of complicity in James Baldwin’s non-fiction. Baldwin’s career allows us to see how the discourse of complicity emerged and shifted over time, from the immediate post-war moment to the 1970s. The chapter argues that Baldwin’s notion of complicity was fundamentally liberal, influenced by Henry James and developed in the milieu of the New York Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s. It shows how Baldwin’s notion of complicity evolved in the 1960s in response to Black Power, the Vietnam War, and Algerian decolonization, obliging him to reevaluate his earlier liberal positions. Baldwin’s 1972 book No Name in the Street deploys the concept of survivor guilt, which emerged from post-Holocaust psychiatry, to articulate this sense of retrospective self-implication. Baldwin’s example shows us how the history of complicity in US literature can be understood as the history of literary complexity.