Forging a truce, forcing an encounter: James Baldwin and the paradox of injury

In States of Injury, Wendy Brown argues that emancipatory projects premised upon the "injured identity" of oppressed groups work inadvertently to solidify hierarchical social structures and generates forms of resentment that are ultimately self-defeating. As such, she urges the abandonment of injured identity as a site of democratic struggle in lieu of more future-oriented modes of political action. I argue that Brown, in advocating for the overcoming of injured identity, overlooks the politically robust dimensions of injured experience and indulges a voluntaristic conception of identity. In developing a positive account of a politics that affirms the conditions of injured identity I turn to consider the nonfiction writings of James Baldwin within the context of Jim Crow. Baldwin forges a "truce" with the legacy of racial oppression in the United States that he draws upon in service of his own anti-racist project. By privileging the experiential dimensions of injured identity, Baldwin advances an emancipatory democratic project that sustains ambivalence regarding the ubiquity of racial injury in American life; he acknowledges its cruelty yet draws upon the insights and energies such a history provides in his own efforts to install a more just future. I conclude by considering how Baldwin's own acknowledgment of the risks and possibilities latent in the experiences of African Americans in the first half of the 20th century may contribute to thinking about the problem of injured identity writ large. Contra Brown, Baldwin gestures towards an account of emancipatory democratic politics that mobilizes the conditions of political injury while averring its potential for disempowerment. I conclude by drawing on Baldwin in articulating a conception of what I call "agonistic testimony" that serves to force encounters with the stories of the oppressed that contest the dispositions listeners bring to the encounter.