초록/요약

A number of scholars have been preoccupied with how the black male protagonist in James Baldwin’s Another Country, Rufus Scott, and his early death, affect the remaining characters and inform the narrative direction of the rest of the novel. Yet the question of how the young African American jazz drummer Rufus himself feels--how he is affected by others and by his society--has either escaped their attention or has been addressed more generally: i.e., that Baldwin’s tragically fated protagonist takes his own life essentially from extreme isolation, desperation, and hopelessness. As a point of departure from the existing interpretative focus, this paper will explore the question of not what racism does, but how racism feels, by attending to the specific ways in which Rufus becomes consumed and literally destroyed by affect. Written pre-Civil Rights, Baldwin’s fiction is sadly still powerfully resonant and even timely when reread in light of memes such as “Black lives>white feelings” or “Black Lives Matter More than White Feelings” that continue to circulate on social media platforms and protest venues today. These messages critically underscore the nexus of race and affect, encapsulating the intertwined relation between the affective (feelings) and the social (lives), which will be the focus of this essay.