Read James Baldwin's "Stranger in the Village" (NR 304), and track Baldwin’s use of the word “stranger.” What does it mean? How and why does the meaning shift? Pick one especially interesting use of the word “stranger” and write a paragraph in which you discuss the nuances of this key term. Include a sentence or two on how being a stranger helps Baldwin bear witness to injustice. Please post your response by Monday 11/8 at 3PM.
Baldwin keeps feeling that he remains as much a stranger as when he first came to the village, but that feeling is different when he comes back a year later. He says “I remain as much a stranger today as I was the first day I arrived” during his first summer in the village because people view him with astonishment and curiosity; people wonder mostly about his physical characteristics such as his skin color and hair color. When he says “I am as much a stranger in this village today as I was the first summer I arrived” the next summer he comes back, he means something different: the village people’s attitudes toward him evolve from simple curiosity to something more complex. They wonder more about him rather than his physical appearance, and this change induces prejudices: some people are kind and friendly to him, some apparently view him with contempt, and some hypocrites accuse him a dirty Negro behind his back while appear friendly drinking with him. The meaning of “Stranger” shifts as he gradually discovers the difference between being a Black in Europe and being a Black in America. In Europe, the Black men do not seem to exist because the Europeans’ black possessions are not present in Europe, which explains the reason that many Europeans fail to understand the causes of the American racial issues in the first place. Whereas in America the Blacks are a part of the society and have closer contact with the Whites, so the relations between the Whites and the Blacks in American are much more complicated. Baldwin’s discovery of the different treatments and attitudes toward the Blacks in Europe not only helps him inspect the racial injustices in America, but also gives him a new perspective on analyzing the causes of American racial injustices and the existing obstacles (such as the White people’ attitudes) in achieving racial justice in America.
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Alexa Elmy
11/9/2014 01:42:27 am
Baldwin’s definition of the word “stranger” depends his time spent in the village. When he is reflecting on his time there he uses stranger to separate himself and to say that the villagers are not taking the time to know him personally. Instead, they are simply seeing his skin color and expressing their curiosity about that. When he initially arrives it is evident that “stranger” refers to his skin color and that the villagers have never seen someone with his skin color. They want to understand it physically. However, as he continues to spend time in the village the locals express interest in his character that suggests unfair stereotypes associated with his skin tone. For example, men assume he is a thief. The sentence, “yet they move with an authority which I shall never have; and they regard me, quite rightly, not only as a stranger in their village but as a suspect latecomer, bearing no credentials, to everything they have-however unconsciously-inherited,” displays the idea of racial superiority and more specially, white supremacy. It says that whites would be welcome in the village without question simply because they are connected by skin color. But, because he is black he cannot simply blend into the village society without question.
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Emily Janik
11/9/2014 05:56:39 am
James Baldwin’s use of the word “stranger” changes in meaning throughout his essay, “Stranger in the Village”. In the ways Baldwin describes it, “stranger” means a black man in a white village, a new arrival, a lesser, someone with a difference, someone unknown, and someone needing saving. The meaning of the word “stranger” shifts with Baldwin’s encounters in the Swiss village. When children called him “neger” in a negative way, stranger became an offensive word. When Baldwin explains that a white man in Africa is as much a stranger as he is in the village, stranger becomes only a term for minority. Every time a person from the village interacted with Baldwin in a new way, he created a new meaning for the work “stranger”. The biggest shift in the meaning of the word is in the last paragraph of the essay. Baldwin says, “I am not, really, a stranger any longer” and intends for the meaning of “stranger” to simply mean “unknown”. After relaying his stories in the village, he seems to conclude that “stranger” ultimately has one meaning, and that all of the other smaller meanings fall under “unknown”.
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Maggie Sposato
11/10/2014 12:28:12 am
The most interesting part of Baldwin's speech is that you do not fully understand his point until the last page or so; then it becomes crystal clear. He speaks of his time entering a Swiss village and how the people reacted to the fact that he was an African American. He defines himself as a stranger there, as most of the people have never even seen a colored person before. The first time he enters, people are fascinated by the aspects of his physical appearance that differ from those of the Swiss people. He acknowledges his arrival in the village the second time as less of a shock for the villagers, but not initially. First, he states "I remain as much a stranger today as I was the first day I arrived" (305). Later, on 309, he backtracks on this statement and says "this is not quite true", because the villagers "wonder less" about him. He writes about how the white Americans poor treatment of blacks has helped to make them less of strangers and can be identified as a type of 'achievement" for African Americans. At first, before Europeans could identify themselves as Americans, they found African American people to be a sort of "cattle", and assured themselves that they were the Aryan race. Now, the African Americans in the 1950s were no longer strangers, and they were just as much American as the former Europeans were. Baldwin's use of the word stranger become less and less weighted as he continues to write. He obviously senses the injustice, but in some ways he accepts it as a way of life, and does not choose to blame the people. He understands that it is an aspect of history, that Europeans saw African Americans as strangers, and the villagers are not to blame because all they know is the culture that they are engulfed in; He notes that most of them have barely even left their small Swiss village. Finally, Baldwin declares himself as a stranger no more by stating "I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive" (313). Essentially, the word stranger evolves from something Baldwin identifies himself as with a negative connotation, to something Baldwin feels he is no longer, leaving off on a more positive note.
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Selena Casas
11/10/2014 01:10:22 am
James Baldwin uses the word stranger in relation to history and power. The reason he remains a stranger even after the people in the village know who he is and where he is from is because they do not his history as an American Negro. They may learn all the details about his personality but they will never understand his and his ancestor’s history in America. When he speaks about the people in the village, he states, “These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modern world.” In this quote, “stranger” is not used in the traditional sense. I have never met any of the people in this village; therefore they are strangers to me. But, according to Baldwin, this is not the case. Even though these people are not known on a personal level, their history precedes them. Being a stranger, by his definition, helped him see how other places were not aware of the way people are all connected in some way.
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Sarika Andavolu
11/10/2014 03:28:53 am
James Baldwin shares the story of his experience in a small Swiss village as an African American man. He is aware of the differences between himself and the people of the village, but this difference is heightened much more because of the way in which they respond to him. The somewhat blissful ignorance of the people of the village leads many of them to call him insulting names unknowingly. Furthermore, Baldwin states that he feels as though he is a stranger because the village people treat him as a different person even when he comes back to visit again. He believes that this is a result of history living in us and our inability to shake it away. He seems to believe that because of his history, he will always be a stranger- he will not be able to step away from it because it is part of him.
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MacKenzie Durkin
11/10/2014 03:31:13 am
When visiting the Swiss village, it appears that Baldwin believes the word stranger means someone different or an outsider. In the village, all the people were white Catholics. They had little contact with anyone outside of their village. They were unaffected by the changing times. When Baldwin visited, he was different from all of them. While they got to know him and learned about him, they never fully understood him. He could never really "fit in" because to them, he was different. Likewise, when white men came to Africa and enslaved Africans to bring to America, they, too, were highlight the "differences" between whites and blacks. In doing so, they made a society which made white people feel superior to blacks in order to protect their social status. Even after slavery ended, the culture that whites are superior and had a responsibility to control and "care" for blacks continued. This idea is why racism survived past the abolition of slavery. White people felt threatened and wanted to keep their social status which they thought was above blacks. By believing themselves to be "better" than blacks, the white people put blacks on a sub-human status. However, though the black are consistently given hardships, they are able to overcome the adversity white American culture breeds. In American culture, stranger means someone below as opposed to different in the Swiss village.
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Marco Bazzarelli
11/10/2014 03:32:20 am
Baldwin first uses the word “stranger” when detailing his arrival to the village, describing the villagers’ blatant shock of seeing a black man. The word evolves throughout his writing, changing its meaning several times. He uses the term stranger at first to explain his sense of unfamiliarity with the villagers. As the piece progresses, the term “stranger” gathers a greater negative connotation, and is associated with a feeling of unwanted sentiment. He concisely notes that he is an unwanted stranger to the villagers, even though he presents himself in a kind and mannerly style. Baldwin is therefore able to witness and take note of all the types of blatant prejudice that would have been more subtle in America. He is called names, ostracized and gossiped about. He is even blamed for thievery, all because of his place as a “stranger” in the village. Being a stranger simply makes Baldwin an easy, unsupported target for injustice.
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Divina Ramgopal
11/10/2014 03:47:43 am
James Baldwin, in his first use of the word “stranger,” notes that this is the perception of himself through the eyes of the villagers, rather than the other way around. He is as just as much an oddity to them as they are to him, yet as a black man, his obvious differences make his strangeness more pronounced. As time goes on in the village he is acquainted with, he does not lose this identity of being a “stranger,” but the connotation of the word morphs into one with a negative edge -- “stranger” becomes equivalent to “unwanted” and “different,” rather than simply “unknown”. With his detached status as a “stranger,” however, Baldwin is able to identify this difference in sentiment towards him in this Swiss village as “wonder” as opposed to prejudice. But despite his best efforts to appear as open and friendly as possible, Baldwin senses the beginnings of the undertone of dislike and prejudice that he sees so frequently in his home country of America, and as such bears witness to the birth of injustice from the womb of “strangeness”.
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Chunyi Jessica Chen
11/10/2014 06:03:10 am
In the passage "Stranger in the Vilage", James Baldwin uses the word "stranger" to refer to himself several times. At first, the word is used as a reference for how he personally feels in the pre-dominantly white Swiss village that has never seen someone with a darker complexion before. He feels distanced from everyone else when they ignore the friendly greetings that he addresses them with and instead choose to view him with an air of awe and speculation. However, Baldwin’s use of the word “stranger” eventually shifts to refer to the African-American community as a whole in relation to the rest of the world. He challenges the discrimination towards the black community by saying that “I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive.” From his initially passive stance on the treatment that “strangers” received from other people, Baldwin eventually moves on to acknowledge the discrimination that is shown to African-Americans and how it has changed over the years. By ending the autobiography with “this world is white no longer, and it will never be white again,” Baldwin leaves the reader with a strong impression of his standpoint, that this discrimination is neither necessary nor acceptable anymore.
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Gabi Perez
11/10/2014 07:31:16 am
In "Stranger in the Village" James Baldwin uses the word "stranger" as a adjective to not only describe himself, but the entirety of African Americans in America and in the world. At first, the word stranger reflects his sentiments as he walks around the village. He is a stranger to these people, because he is not like them. Some scream in fear, others approach carefully. He slowly becomes more familiar to them, but his race, to them, makes him a stranger because African Americans are to them are almost like a myth. In contrast to how African Americans in the U.S. are no longer strangers because they have had time to adjust, fight for rights, and become altogether citizens. Stranger can also be, at times, synonymous with more negative connotations, like outsider, not wanted, or intruder. In his passage, there is sentence where he explains this sentiment. On pg 306, Baldwin states: "I am a stranger here. But I am not a stranger in America, and the same syllable riding on the American air expresses the war my presence has occasioned in the American soul." Basically, Americans no longer see him as a stranger, because of all of the instances of social injustice concerning African Americans, and how familiar they have become.
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Jasmin Castillo
11/10/2014 07:37:38 am
James Baldwin uses the word "stranger" to describe himself first. This gives the word "stranger" a definition along the lines of "not belonging, or being different. Almost like an exercise given to a little baby where they are told to "find the one that does not fit." That one is the stranger: James Baldwin. As the essay progresses though, Baldwin uses the word again but it is implicitly redefined. He says, "These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it." He then goes on to explain how "these people" are related to historical figures that have influenced the way the world works. By using the word "stranger" in this way, he redefines it to mean detached from the creation of a society. Because he, as a stranger, is detached from the society, he is able to see injustice because he is objective. He has no substantial stake in the society. Critiquing the society on its injustices has no effect on him because he would not be critiquing his own creation.
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Becky Earley
11/10/2014 08:45:59 am
In James Baldwin's "Stranger in a Village," he does not overuse the word stranger. He mentions himself as a stranger in the Swiss village a few times, and then mentions strangers in historical context. His definition of the word stranger seems to be anyone that is from a different place and who has qualities or features the person is not used to or has never seen before. The people in the village have never seen an African-American man before and find many things about him strange. Baldwin shows how he was treated differently just because he was strange to the people. At first, he talks about how people would touch his hair or see if the color would run off of his hands. Later, he mentions how people would talk about him behind his back and say he was le sale negre who was stealing wood. All this came about because he was a stranger and the people in the village did not understand him. The use of the word stranger hit me the most in the last paragraph. "No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive." He means that he is not strange to Americans. African-Americans have lived in America even before the country began. He means that we need to stop looking at African-Americans as being different from us.
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Huibo Tian
11/10/2014 01:45:40 pm
The definition of the word “stranger” shifts a lot to James Baldwin after he spends more time to visit the Swiss village. First of all, he defines himself as a stranger because most of people in that village do not contact outside people often and also because James Baldwin is an African American, so people treat or see him like a stranger because most of the people have never even seen a colored person in their life. Therefore, James Baldwin could not blend in because the difference of skin color. For example, he mentions that "I remain as much a stranger today as I was the first day I arrived" in his beginning paragraph. Meanwhile, the “stranger” status does not change no matter how much black people want nothing but just justice because white people would like to keep the position they have and do not want to change any of it.