28 pages • 56 minutes read
James BaldwinStranger in the Village
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1953A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
James Baldwin (The Author)
James Baldwin (1924-1987) was born in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance. He remained in the United States until 1948, when he moved to Europe at age 24. By the time he published “Stranger in the Village” in 1953, Baldwin had established his name in several genres: the novel, the short story, and the essay.
In Europe, specifically France, Baldwin found a freedom that enabled his writing. From this distance, he could write about his experience as a queer Black American man. Many of his fictional works, novels and short stories alike, are situated in the US and centered around race and gender; his essays frequently address gender and race too. Baldwin suggested that he was the right person to critique white American masculinity because of how he was situated in relation to it as a Black American man. From his vantage, he could see what white American men could not. His work also discusses the near impossibility of having the conversation he nevertheless insists we must have as Americans. On one hand, white people cannot confess their need for Black people without sacrificing the fantastical position they think they hold as white people; on the other hand, Black people cannot address their history without including a damning accusation about white people.
Much of Baldwin’s writing career was devoted to engaging the questions surrounding race and gender in an American context. He published numerous essays in magazines and journals, as well as several essay collections, including Nobody Knows My Name (1961) and The Fire Next Time (1963). His fiction writing—which resulted in six novels and several short stories—often coincided with his nonfiction work. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, debuted in 1953, the same year “Stranger in the Village” was published. Baldwin was at work on his second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), when he completed the manuscript for his first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955). “Stranger in the Village” concludes that collection, which established Baldwin as a unique and important voice of his generation. The essays collected therein were not published in chronological order, meaning “Stranger in the Village” holds a privileged place as the culmination of the collection. Indeed, “Stranger in the Village” stands as a segue from Baldwin’s earliest essays to his later work during the civil rights movement and beyond.
Swiss Villagers
The Swiss children serve as a foil for white Americans in general and especially white American men. In Baldwin’s account, white American men want impossibly to hold onto their innocence. The innocence they desire to hold onto is like that of the Swiss children who follow Baldwin as he goes on his way. For every resonance with white American people, Baldwin points out the ways in which their situations are radically different. Baldwin’s framing addresses the question of innocence head-on. White American men cannot maintain their claim to innocence, no matter how hard they try, while across the chasm of experience, the Swiss children hold it naturally.
The Swiss villagers participate in a ministry collection whereby they “‘[buy]’ African natives for the purpose of converting them to Christianity” (120). In Baldwin’s account, white people arrived in Africa with the mission of conquering and converting. The Swiss villagers, for all their claims to innocence, are unknowingly participating in this legacy of inhuman treatment of persons—“buying” them in pursuit of a cause. As in the American situation, Baldwin writes that no one person can be held responsible for such a catastrophic event as enslavement and slavery.
Despite this similarity—that both the Swiss and Americans participate unknowingly and without actual malice—Baldwin notes, “There is a dreadful abyss between the streets of this village and the streets of the city in which I was born […] the abyss is experience, the American experience” (123). The significance of Baldwin’s concluding explication becomes clear in this light. Baldwin concludes, “This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again” (129). In other words, the gulf between the Swiss and American experiences does not obscure the fact that the world will not return to the pre-enslavement era, and there is no escaping the implications: For the Swiss as the Americans, the world is now in color.
Using the Swiss villagers as a foil also allows Baldwin to discuss white Americans’ European inheritance. Perhaps most importantly, this leads Baldwin to address white supremacy as the prevailing mode of thought in “the West.” At the same time, this cultural inheritance stands in contrast to the lack of cultural inheritance for Black people. While white people stand in relation to Leonardo Da Vinci and so on, Black people can only trace their history back to a ledger where their ancestors’ lives were signed away. Finally, Baldwin uses the example of the cathedral at Chartres to explain how he approaches the same edifice with a different set of feelings and experiences because of who he has been told he is.
White American Men
While Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” overtly focuses on race, it is best understood as an intersectional analysis of race and gender. At the center of his analysis is a conflict between Black and white American men. Black men experience rage; white men defend their innocence. The white American man in particular has importance in this essay because, whereas the Black man has had no choice but to come to terms with his position, the white man has refused to acknowledge the significance of this interracial dynamic to the founding and development of the US. The text can be read as a confrontation of those white American men who cling to innocence and deny their reliance on others for their identities.
White American men import the innocence of Europe without having the distance from Black people required to maintain it. Baldwin describes this conflict repeatedly as a battle, and he notes that “the battle for [the Black man’s] identity has long ago been won” (127). What this implies for the white American man is that innocence is no longer a tenable position to hold. It is no longer possible to deny Black people their humanity in order to remain in the position of white privilege and power. The struggle is for Black men “to establish an identity” and for the white American man to defend “his identity” (127). In the end, Baldwin writes, “the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too” (129).
Although much of Baldwin’s analysis in this essay can be applied across genders, it is significant that he writes frequently about white American men specifically. The primary contrast in the essay, with which the essay begins, is between Swiss children (who are innocent as children and innocent as Europeans) and white American men (who claim innocence even though they do not have innocence, either as men or as Americans). This contrast draws attention to one of Baldwin’s regular themes: the problem of innocence.
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