UH West Oʻahu Assistant Professor of English David N. Odhiambo’s article, “James Baldwin’s Another Country as an Abstract Machine,” was published by Pacific Coast Philology in April 2017.
Dr. Odhiambo’s essay on James Baldwin’s third novel examines how Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze’s abstract machines diagram an unfolding flow of desires in a bipolar process of becoming that produces two distinct genres in Baldwin’s novel, a protest-literature narrative and an asubjective text. This movement between genres disrupts Baldwin’s novel by rupturing the stable surfaces of the protest-literature narrative with a chain of significations that enable it to become a new text, and in doing so, unbecome what it was. Consequently, the article examines how abstract machines shape a novel, set in Greenwich Village during the 1950s, that anticipates social changes that emerge in the civil rights movement of the 1960s through this encounter of discourses.
David N. Odhiambo is the author of three novels: “diss/ed banded nation,” “Kipligat’s Chance,” and the “Reverend’s Apprentice.” He teaches literature and creative writing in English at UHWO.