Queer Tidalectics: Sea-change in Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

In his second novel Giovanni’s Room (1956), often quoted among the texts reconstructing a queer genealogy, the African American writer James Baldwin presented the damaging effects of what Jafari S. Allan has termed Western classed and ‘racialized heteropatriarchy’ (Allen 2012). Drawing on the fruitful conflation of two theoretical paradigms – namely Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of ‘tidalectics’ and the work on queer temporalities (Halberstan 2005; Muñoz 2009; Freeman 2010) – this paper aims at exploring how, through the use of aquatic imagery as a dissolvent of borders and categories, Baldwin tries to find a language to express an alternative to this normative and oppressive system. Brathwaite’s ‘tidalectics’ (a ‘tidal dialectic’), that draws on the back and forth movement of the tides to express a cyclical temporality which resists closure, parallels the resistance of queer temporalities to ‘chrononormativity’, that is the structuring of individuals’ lifetime according to the rhythms of birth, accumulation of wealth, reproduction, and death. In Baldwin’s novel, shaped around the ménage à trois which sees the male protagonist (David) involved with his American fiancée (Hella) and his Italian secret lover (Giovanni), it is especially the room that David shares with Giovanni which assumes aquatic connotations. The room then, through the paradigm offered by the ‘queer tidalectics’, will be read as an ever-changing place of transformation that enables Baldwin to find a site for the expression and recognition of queer desire, while disrupting the linearity of Western historiography and gender essentialism.