Showing results for "Another Country" in World Literature

When Another Country appeared in 1962, it caused a literary sensation. James Baldwin's masterly story of desire, hatred and violence opens with the unforgettable character of Rufus Scott, a scavenging Harlem jazz musician adrift in New York. Self-destructive, bad and brilliant, he draws us into a Bohemian underworld pulsing with heat, music and sex, where desperate and dangerous characters betray, love and test each other to the limit.

while they sleep (under the bed is another country) is written in dialogic fragments and interspersed with prose poems reflecting on the lasting impact of colonial trauma. The bed on which America sleeps is built on the fear that the nations it has oppressed will rise up against it, a monstrous shadow in a child's nightmare. Written in English, while they sleep points to an imperialist American identity: the dormant body of the text. Answering in Spanish, under the bed is another country is the footnote, the monster under the bed, the colony: Puerto Rico.