Choosing Both

In this chapter, Monika Gehlawat examines Beauford Delaney’s proclivity for choosing both abstraction and figuration to achieve formal and political ends and how this links his painting to James Baldwin’s nonfiction. Baldwin uses pronoun play as a rhetorical strategy to enact a vision of democracy he finds lacking in America; considering his linguistic methods alongside Delaney’s experiments with abstraction and figuration clarifies how Baldwin refuses to surrender the authenticity of his own personhood even as he demands that the value of human life in American be equally and interchangeably valued. In language, Baldwin lays claim both to the resources of personhood (as figuration) and to the symbolic status of citizenship (as abstraction). As Black American artists, Delaney and Baldwin balanced the historical pressure to represent the particularities of Black life with the artistic freedom to transcend limitations on identity.