Baldwin’s Balls: Sensuality, Profanity, and the Testicular Fortitude to Reckon with Race

Both sensuality and profanity dwell within love’s truthful self-expression. James Baldwin’s oeuvre reads race relations in the United States, revealing a skewed balance between sensuality and profanity rectified through authentic sensual connections across racial lines. This essay introduces Baldwin’s work as an exemplar of world reading, an ingredient of cultural literacy, to argue that sensuality prevents society from dismissing negative emotions as merely symptomatic of race or class resentment. Centering on profanity, the argument relies on how Baldwin deftly constructs sensuality as an inversive emotional balm for healing the US race problem through the feminine energeia found in his pervasive testicular discourse.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC

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