And, two or three days later, I saw his face in the headlines of a Paris paper. He spoke of using some of the people he met: ‘‘We all met in a bar, there was a blond French guy sitting at a table, he bought us drinks. While whiteness has been traditionally opposed to blackness, and even while heterosexuality has usually been constructed in opposition to homosexuality, Giovanni’s Room ultimately reveals their interrelatedness and mutual dependence.Some of the atmosphere in “Giovanni’s Room” came from close observation and experience, as Baldwin made clear in an interview in 1980. Moreover, Baldwin not only depicts the binary oppositions that shape the dominant sexual and racial discourse but also ends up deconstructing them from highly subversive and innovative perspectives.

By exploring the color-full associations that Baldwin established between whiteness and heterosexuality on the one hand and homosexuality and blackness on the other, we will see how in Giovanni’s Room the discourses of race and (homo)sexuality are inseparable from each other. In so doing, I attempt to demonstrate that Giovanni’s Room is not (only) about homosexuality but (also) about race. Borrowing from recent work on the symbolism of whiteness and/as color, I will show how the white-versus-black dichotomy plays a very meaning-full role in Baldwin’s novel, revealing both descriptive and symbolic (sexual) meanings. More specifically, I will be arguing that in Giovanni’s Room race is deflected onto sexuality with the result that whiteness is transvalued as heterosexuality, just as homosexuality becomes associated with blackness, both literally and metaphorically. While apparently raceless, the novel not only makes whiteness visible as a specific ethnic construct but also illustrates its dependence on other hegemonic categories, particularly masculinity and heterosexuality. Moving beyond these assumptions, however, this article is centrally concerned with race-ing James Baldwin’s early fiction, particularly Giovanni’s Room, illustrating the relevance of race in general to the novel, and of whiteness in particular.

AbstractEven though criticism is increasingly challenging the traditional view of James Baldwin’s earlier novels as “whimsical detours,” these texts continue to be read as “white” and, therefore, studied in sexual rather than racial terms, in (white) gay studies rather than African American studies.

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin