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In this chapter, Walton Muyumba observes that while the claim is provocative that James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” is his homage to Beauford Delaney, the author actually has doubled himself within the short story: Sonny, the improvising artist, and his brother, the narrator-as-critic, are both versions of Baldwin. Even more significant is how, as Delaney’s work became more abstract in the 1950s and 1960s, Baldwin was propelled toward critical abstraction. What he arrived at is a credo of ethical shattering: for Baldwin, to move toward the end of a project was not to finalize it but to force the reader/viewer/listener into an abstractionist self-interrogation, one that shatters preconceptions and drives us to that place where we must disassociate ourselves from ourselves in order to do the close interrogation needed for social renewal.

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