A Conversation in 2020 with James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind”
One of the worst forms of propaganda about text and reading in formal schooling is that any text has a fixed meaning, independent of the reader, the reader’s history, or the writer and the writer’s history.
Traditionally, K-12 schooling, often in English courses, has implemented a very reduced version of New Criticism that frames all text meaning as a static formula whereby the reader adds up the techniques and discovers an authoritative meaning (that is singular and, again, not grounded in the people creating meaning or the conditions surrounding either the writing or the reading). More recently this anemic approach to text and reading has been reinvigorated by the “close reading” movement embedded in the failed Common Core era.
In 2020 as the Trump era could be coming to a close and the U.S. is being ravaged by a pandemic and another round of something like mainstream racial awareness, I re-read James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind.”
The 1962 publication of this essay (which becomes a section of The Fire Next Time) had a distinct historical and personal set of purposes—Baldwin’s CONTINUE READING: A Conversation in 2020 with James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind” – radical eyes for equity
