In this course, students will read both select works by James Baldwin and that of some of his nearest interlocutors, including, but not limited to, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Lorraine Hansberry and Toni Morrison. While it is critical to consider the breadth of his creative output that spanned decades, it is also important to remember that Baldwin was always writing alongside, to and sometimes in conflict with his contemporaries. Too, our class will ask students to think with Baldwin as he complicates the definitions and positions of blackness as he travels to and from various locations in the United States and Europe. In putting Baldwin in conversation with fellow writers and cultural producers, in following him from New York City to Paris and beyond, in situating him as a writer, an intellectual, an activist and a holder of Black queer knowledges, our course will aim to appreciate the fullness of Baldwin's interventions into the discourses on structural power, and why his work continues to resonate today.