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Podcast: New Books in American Studies
Episode: John Drabinski, "So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic" (Northwestern UP, 2025)
Description: What happens if we turn to James Baldwin, not just for the amazing quotations and excellent photos, but as a critical theorist? What if we read his nonfiction philosophically? What can Baldwin help us understand and do now? In So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic (Northwestern UP, 2025), John Drabinski takes up this project to give a sustained philosophical reading of Baldwin’s nonfiction. Drabinski does so to understand the event of Baldwin’s contributions in the context of the Black Atlantic. Baldwin was a thinker who looked to the United States, even when in exile. But he was...