A 100-day centenary celebration of acclaimed author and civil rights activist James Baldwin by the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life will culminate with a performance, presentations, and reception at 5 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 2, in Dartmouth Hall 105.
Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat, whose 2019 book Everything Inside won the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Prize, among others, will discuss Baldwin’s significance. Award-winning actor Harry Lennix, who recently starred on the long-running NBC television series The Blacklist, will read from Baldwin’s work. And the New York City-based Eden Brooklyn Dance Theater will take the stage for a performance.
Registration is open for the event, which will also be livestreamed.
Baldwin’s extensive body of work includes essays, poetry, plays, and novels, including If Beale Street Could Talk and the semi-autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain, both of which inspired films by the same names. Baldwin, who was openly gay, broke ground with his novel Giovanni’s Room, which explored themes such as homosexuality, bisexuality, and masculinity.
Kimberly Juanita Brown, the institute’s director and an associate professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing, notes Baldwin’s profound effect on American literature, African American literature, and Black studies, and his ease across genres.
“Given the depth and the breadth of his work and how pathbreaking it was, I think a series of celebrations that are about what he’s brought to the world of letters and what he brings as a civil rights activist, as a thinker, as a scholar are worthy of a big celebration,” says Brown, who recalls being taken with Baldwin’s essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time as a student. “What better time than in his 100th year to do that?”
On Aug. 2, which would have been Baldwin’s 100th birthday, the institute began posting short videos on Instagram of students, staff, alumni, and other scholars and writers reading from his work. The video project has generated a lot of enthusiasm, Brown says, and more clips will be added on Instagram and the IBICL website.
The gathering on Saturday, co-sponsored by the English and creative writing and African and African American studies departments, will be “a fabulous tribute to an exceptional man and a gifted writer,” she says. “And we’re going to have a lot of fun.”