James Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name: American Social Discourse Paradoxical Functioning

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.