Eddie Glaude teaches African American Studies at Princeton. Begin Again was published in summer 2020, in the months between George Floyd's murder and the presidential election. The book has the quality of a public lecture delivered to a country that has just discovered, for the third or fourth time, what its Black citizens have been telling it for two centuries.
Glaude's organizing move is to read the later Baldwin — No Name in the Street (1972), The Devil Finds Work (1976), The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985) — as a body of writing produced after the high civil-rights period had ended in disappointment and after the post-1968 American settlement had ratified the disappointment. The Baldwin of these books is darker, more weary, and more politically lucid than the Baldwin of Notes of a Native Son. Glaude argues that we have not been reading the later Baldwin closely enough and that doing so is one of the things the present moment needs.
The argument lands. The chapter on Baldwin's friendship with the young Black radicals of the late 1960s — and on his attempt to translate between their politics and the older civil-rights tradition he came from — is particularly fine. So is Glaude's personal essay-writing, which is unsparing about his own grief at the political failures of the Obama-Trump-Biden decade.
Four stars because the book occasionally sermonizes; the prose, when Glaude lets the argument do the work, is excellent. Crown is the standard edition.
Editorial commentary
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.'s Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (2020) is a sustained engagement with the later writing of James Baldwin — particularly the essays of the 1970s and 1980s, after Baldwin's well-known earlier essays and novels had been received and after his political engagement had moved beyond the period of the civil-rights movement's most visible institutional successes.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is professor of African-American studies at Princeton University. His books — Democracy in Black (2016), Begin Again (2020), the earlier scholarly work on pragmatism and the African-American tradition — extend across academic intellectual history and contemporary public-political intervention. He has been one of the most prominent Black-American academic public intellectuals of the post-2010 period.
Glaude argues that Baldwin's later writing documents a specific analytical position — the position of a Black American writer whose hopes for the political reconstruction of the American social order had been substantially disappointed but whose analytical and moral resources had not been exhausted — that is of continuing analytical relevance.
Glaude's analytical claim is that the American political tradition has produced multiple periods of apparent progress on questions of racial justice that have been followed by periods of reversal; that the pattern is structural rather than incidental; and that Baldwin's later writing engages the pattern with a moral and analytical seriousness that the broader American political-philosophical tradition has often lacked.
The book is structured as both academic argument and public-political intervention. Glaude is one of the most prominent Black-American academic public intellectuals of the contemporary period; the book operates in the register of an academic engagement aimed at general readers as well as specialist audiences. The 2020 Crown paperback is the standard edition.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.
Where this archive links to a book purchase, the link routes through Bookshop.org, which directs a share of the purchase price to independent bookstores. Affiliate disclosures are at the foot of every page; the editorial selection is not influenced by the affiliate arrangement.
Editorial commentary
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.'s Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (2020) is a sustained engagement with the later writing of James Baldwin — particularly the essays of the 1970s and 1980s, after Baldwin's well-known earlier essays and novels had been received and after his political engagement had moved beyond the period of the civil-rights movement's most visible institutional successes.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is professor of African-American studies at Princeton University. His books — Democracy in Black (2016), Begin Again (2020), the earlier scholarly work on pragmatism and the African-American tradition — extend across academic intellectual history and contemporary public-political intervention. He has been one of the most prominent Black-American academic public intellectuals of the post-2010 period.
Glaude argues that Baldwin's later writing documents a specific analytical position — the position of a Black American writer whose hopes for the political reconstruction of the American social order had been substantially disappointed but whose analytical and moral resources had not been exhausted — that is of continuing analytical relevance.
Glaude's analytical claim is that the American political tradition has produced multiple periods of apparent progress on questions of racial justice that have been followed by periods of reversal; that the pattern is structural rather than incidental; and that Baldwin's later writing engages the pattern with a moral and analytical seriousness that the broader American political-philosophical tradition has often lacked.
The book is structured as both academic argument and public-political intervention. Glaude is one of the most prominent Black-American academic public intellectuals of the contemporary period; the book operates in the register of an academic engagement aimed at general readers as well as specialist audiences. The 2020 Crown paperback is the standard edition.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.
Where this archive links to a book purchase, the link routes through Bookshop.org, which directs a share of the purchase price to independent bookstores. Affiliate disclosures are at the foot of every page; the editorial selection is not influenced by the affiliate arrangement.