In “Thoughts on Late Style,” Edward Said describes how an artist’s late works 

cannot be reconciled or resolved, since their irresolution and fragmentariness are constitutive, neither ornamental nor symbolic of something else. The late works are about ‘lost totality’, and it is in this sense that they are catastrophic.

 The late works of James Baldwin have often been dismissed as evidence of decadence, of their maker’s exhaustion after too many years of activism, as a crude failure to synthesize his fiction and nonfiction, the novels too political, the essays too aesthetic. Yet this supposedly weak synthesis rhymes with Said’s meditations on the irresolution typical of an artist’s late works. 

Still, we lack anything like a comprehensive theory of the late Baldwin. To begin to remedy this, we invite papers that engage with Baldwin’s later novels, If Beale Street Could Talk and Just Above My Head, or late essays like The Evidence of Things Not Seen, “The Price of the Ticket,” or “Every Good-bye Ain’t Gone.” What form do these works take? How do we describe the late Baldwin style? 

For the Modern Language Association Convention in Los Angeles in 2027, James Baldwin Review invites proposals for 15-minute papers in a panel on Baldwin’s late works. 

Please send abstracts of 250 words to jbr@wustl.edu by March 20, 2026.