Spillers discusses the significance of James Baldwin’s work at the inaugural lecture of the series. (Jun Ru Chen | Contributing Photographer)

Are we heading toward oblivion? This is the question Hortense J. Spillers, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University, sought to answer during her visit to WashU. Spillers delivered the inaugural James Baldwin Lecture in Emerson Auditorium, Nov. 13. 

The James Baldwin Lecture is a new lecture series connected to the James Baldwin Review. Founded in 2014 by WashU professors Dwight A. McBride and Justin A. Joyce, together with Douglas Field of the University of Manchester, the review recently released its eleventh volume, reaching readers in more than 180 countries. 

“WashU has been an exceptionally welcoming and supportive institutional home for the journal,” Joyce wrote in an email to Student Life. “Starting an annual lecture series seemed a uniquely powerful way to help bring the scholars that are contributing to the journal into direct conversation, in real time, with WashU’s incredible campus community.”

McBride said Spillers immediately came to mind due to her influential essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” along with her countless other contributions to African American literary study.

“Her scholarship has been, in a word, generative,” McBride wrote. “She represents the best of capacious critical thinking in a time when it’s so necessary. To honor Baldwin’s legacies, it seemed only fitting to have such a titan of Black letters as Hortense Spillers be the inaugural speaker.” 

The lecture, “Achieving Our Country: Baldwin and U.S. Politics Today,” examined the relevance of Baldwinian thought in our current political climate. Spillers was particularly interested in looking at James Baldwin’s collection of essays, “The Fire Next Time,” and the themes of childhood and history throughout it.

First-year Sasha Jacobson appreciated linking Baldwin to contemporary times.

“I appreciated how [Baldwin’s] ideas and unique perspective could be applied to dealing with current issues in our world,” Jacobson said. 

“The Fire Next Time” begins with an essay titled “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.” The nephew referenced in the title, also named James, was 14 at the time of writing, which Spillers noted was also a very important age for Baldwin himself. 

“Baldwin recalls his own 14th year as a gateway to a kind of consciousness,” Spillers said. “The birth of desire as it comes to be systematically understood in one’s teen years [will] be the threshold of guilt and secrecy that will mark and wound an adult personality for the rest of his life,” Spillers said.

According to Spillers, Baldwinian thought dictates that Black Americans must begin the path of the hero’s journey by confronting historical systems of Black dehumanization in order to fully realize their present self. 

Spillers also explored how Baldwin’s understanding of history moves parallel with tragedy, remarking that denying the tragic amounts to a denial of death.

“The human trouble, Baldwin argues, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives,” Spillers said. “[We] will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death which is the only fact we have.” 

Spillers critiqued American politics for shifting toward an ideology that doesn’t confront the history of racism and injustice.

“We could say in the current juncture that the one revolutionary birthright of a democratic citizen jury has been forfeited voluntarily for the cheap assurances of a reactive fantastical infantilized dream of oblivion and forgetfulness,” Spillers said.

Spillers expanded on this through talking about how Americans want to forget the long and imperfect journey that brought the country to prominence, pointing to what she calls the surrender of the university, the banning of books, and the assumption that critique is inherently unpatriotic as chief reasons for the reassertion of racism and tribalism in America. 

First-year Micah Rosenthal said he was particularly worried about Spillers’ point about banned books.

“It is scary that we are existing in a time where books are being banned and information is being kept from people,” Rosenthal said. “We cannot let something so terrible happen in our modern day.”

Spillers ended her lecture with a call to arms quoted directly from Baldwin.

“Everything now we must assume is in our hands,” Spillers said. “We have no right to assume otherwise.” 

She opined that if we start to cultivate and kindle the consciousness of others, whether white or Black, we can achieve the ideals of our country and end the disillusionment with democracy. Spillers additionally said that if we don’t act now, we risk confirming what Baldwin warned would happen, that unlike the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark in which God purified the earth with water, the next time humanity’s wickedness overwhelms the world, we will be met with fire, something far more devastating.

“We must now dare everything,” Spiller said, “and failing to do so, the fulfillment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us. ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time.’” 

Joyce said the James Baldwin Lecture series will become an annual tradition, and the speaker for next year is already selected.