ABSTRACT
In an essay written in 1952, just before the publication of his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin describes his frustration, as a young African American writer, at being relegated by editors to assignments reviewing books about American race relations (1998a: 5). Unsatisfied with work he finds reductive, repetitive, and uninspiring, Baldwin writes,
[i]t is quite possible to say that the price a Negro pays for becoming articulate is to find himself … with nothing to be articulate about. (“You taught me language,” says Caliban to Prospero, “and my profit on’t is I know how to curse).
The Tempest, 1.2.366–7, quoted in Baldwin 1998a: 7