Teaching Against Sentimentality

James Baldwin’s Pedagogy of Refusal

Abstract

This paper argues that James Baldwin’s critique of sentimentality offers a model for ethical reading and teaching grounded in the pedagogy of refusal. Through close readings of Everybody’s Protest Novel (1949) and Alas, Poor Richard(1961), I explore how Baldwin challenges protest literature’s reliance on emotional legibility, exposing the ways in which sympathy and identification flatten human complexity and present suffering as spectacle. While Baldwin’s early critique of Richard Wright’s Native Son is often read as polemical, this paper demonstrates how his later return to Wright further complicates rather than retracts that position, revealing an ethics of judgement attentive to grief and constraint. In conversation with Saidiya Hartman’s (1997) account of empathy as a “violence of identification” and a contemporary example from American Fiction (2023), the paper situates Baldwin’s concerns within ongoing debates about commodification, representation, as well as pedagogy. Ultimately, I suggest that Baldwin’s work articulates a pedagogy of refusal that resists sentimentality’s consolations and insists on an interpretation without guarantees.