Intoxicating Blackness: Addiction and Ambivalent Sounds of Fugitive Life in James Baldwin’s 'Sonny’s Blues'

This article examines the intersection of drug-use, aesthetics, and Blackness at work in James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” (1957). While much of the scholarship on Baldwin’s story has dwelt on the significance of music, far less attention has been paid to the equally prominent and related theme of drug addiction and intoxication. Through an historical contextualization and analysis of the story, I provide an exegesis of Baldwin’s unique theorization of drug addiction, or what I am calling intoxicating Blackness, particularly as it relates to black aesthetics. By surveying formulations of drug addiction in European thought and the counter-discourse of black radical thought, I argue that Baldwin’s short story figures an innovative notion of being on drugs. Unlike subsequent, often disparaging depictions of addiction in the political discourse of the Black Power Movement and other late twentieth-century black popular culture, ‘Sonny’s Blues’ represents addiction as a cite of possibility. Baldwin suggests that an openness to intoxication and addiction, although perilous for the addict, might function as an aesthetic of black fugitivity and that any sort of black life might be thought of as a dangerous, fugitive narcotic. To elaborate on this theory of intoxicating Blackness, I consider it in relation to Western philosophical, legal, and psychoanalytic paradigms of addiction, as well as conceptualizations of Blackness and fugitivity in the work of thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter, Fred Moten, and Frantz Fanon.