SOURCE: "A Play of Abstractions: Race, Sexuality, and Community in James Baldwin's Another Country," in Southern Review, Vol. 29, No. 1, January, 1993, pp. 41-50.

In the following essay, Rowden analyzes racial and sexual identity in Baldwin's Another Country, focusing on the character of Rufus, his relationships, and his place in the community.

Of the many blindnesses that have characterized critical readings of James Baldwin's work, one of the most consistent has been the critical failure to consider seriously the lack of continuity uniting the persona of racial spokesman that Baldwin adopts in many of his essays and that of sexual utopian that he develops in his fiction. Although it is usually the completely whitewashed Giovanni's Room to which Baldwin critics point when they want to strip him of his raceman credentials, it is actually in Baldwin's novel Another Country, with its general exclusion of black men and its racial scapegoating...