SOURCE: "Beneath the Black Aesthetic: James Baldwin's Primer of Black American Masculinity," in African American Review, Vol. 32, No. 2, Summer, 1998, pp. 247-61.

In the following essay, Shin and Judson analyze the change in Baldwin's presentation of homosexuality between Giovanni's Room and Just Above My Head.

It has become commonplace to suggest the similarities in the histories of the black and feminist consciousness movements of the 1960s and '70s, especially the critical blindnesses that threatened to undermine the very solidarity crucial to political identity.¹ The conspicuous elision of women from black nationalism's struggle to achieve political recognition for its people was matched by feminism's inability to countenance the interests of ethnic women in its vision of cultural renovation. Just as the Black Panthers lorded it over their women, middle-class white feminists failed to recognize the different needs of women of color—especially Black women—who served in their very...