James Baldwin was one of 20th-century America's most exacting writers and critics. He probed, with forensic insight, bracing vulnerability, sly wit, and unsurpassed lyricism, this country's inability to face up to its brutal history and near pathological preoccupation with race. A black gay man of enormous celebrity (with complex reservations and understandings about both categories), Baldwin implored his readers—black or white, straight or not—to confront the meanings, instabilities, and manufactured character of these identity markers, and consider the possibility that "any real change implies the break-up of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety." Now, his incisive interrogations of the moral history of this country are newly and urgently relevant. This class will consider Baldwin's body of work—not just in relation to his own time, but to our troubling climate of renewed crisis and revanchist politics—and place it in dialogue with a broad range of classic and cutting-edge literary practitioners such as Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, William Faulkner, Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Fran Lebowitz, Hilton Als, Colm Tóibín, among others.