James Baldwin’s nobody knows my name : American social discourse paradoxical functioning

Abstract EN

In Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin deals with black American identity evolution in a white hegemonic America.

Through his experience as a man of colour, writer and art critic, he shows how American western ideal functions through a hegemonic social discourse, a “paradox” based on an interaction between segregation and integration.

He shows how the white dominant social discourse crosses socio-economic and cultural spaces with huge consequences on the definition of a Negro, “a nigger”.

He is optimistic and develops the inevitable emergence of Afro-American counter discourse which expresses a struggle for survival through African roots, black Arts Renaissance and political activism.