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“The Namesake” by Jhumpa Lahiri Essay

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Gogol is a second-generation immigrant of an Indian Bengali family. As an America born child, he first tried to resist his parents’ Indian culture. The evidence from the novel “ The Namesake ” suggests that, there was a change in Gogol, when he later realizes his Indian culture. In this essay, we will try to figure out the events that indicate that Gogol later tried to accumulate the Indian culture. We will also explore that what was the impact of these events on the story.

The Asian immigrants to the foreign countries especially the United States found themselves alienated from their own country. They could not assimilate into their own culture because they think that the foreign culture does not represent their ideological and cultural values. The children who are born in America do not mostly want to adopt the life style of their parents, as they think US as their own country. Gogol is one such example.

One of the prominent examples of Gogol submission towards Indian culture is his abandonment of Maxine. Gogol and Maxine had good time together. Maxine’s parents, Lydia and Gerald, also did not create any hurdle in their friendship. They even think Gogol as a US born citizen.

Maxine herself had no problem with Gogol; she even expresses the desire to go India. Gogol’s abandonment of Maxine despite his father’s death suggests there was something else that prevented his relationship with Maxine. Gogol has developed a contradictory personality like his parents. His identity is divided, and could not identify between both the cultures.

He stepped out of Maxine’s life for good. Recently, bumping into Gerald and Lydia in a gallery, he learned of their daughter’s engagement to another man. (Lahiri 188)

The second event that is most prominent is his marriage with a Bengali girl called Moushumi. He accepted his mother’s wish to marry her despite his good relationship with Maxine. He could have easily rejected the marriage proposal, but because of his connection with the Indian culture, he was able to marry her.

Third evidence of his connection with India is his family’s frequent visits to India. Indian culture was not something new for Gogol. His family’s frequent visit to India made him realize the Indian culture. Gogol’s parents wanted their children to indulge in Indian culture, because they must be able to realize this culture. However, despite all these things Gogol thinks himself as American.

He longs for her as his parents have longed, all these years, for the people they love in India – for the first time in his life he know this feeling. (Lahiri 117)

The result for retaining his parent’s Indian culture was not always favourable for Gogol. His marriage resulted in divorce and he could not maintain relationship with Bengali wife. Gogol American lifestyle was very natural; however, his realization of his culture was a spiritual bond, which was a connection to his family values and a memory for his father’s death.

The death of his father revives the hidden love for his second country. We have seen in the novel that Gogol has problems with his own name. He in his early part of live moved away from his family, but later the adoptions of his old name suggest that he could not live a life ignoring his Parent’s background.

Works Cited

Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004.

Further Study: FAQ

📌 what is a namesake example, 📌 is the namesake by jhumpa lahiri a true story, 📌 what is the namesake about, 📌 why did ashoke name his son gogol.

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The Namesake

67 pages • 2 hours read

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Essay Topics

To what extent does Gogol’s name determine his life journey? How do other characters’ names affect their identities?

Explore Ashima’s progress from a Bengali student to an American librarian through analysis of three key scenes. How does this compare to Gogol’s journey to accepting his identity?

Locate and analyze examples of how the author represents the differences between Bengali and American cultures. How do these differences tie into the novel’s themes concerning identity?

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The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

• Publication Date: December 11, 2006
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books
• ISBN-10: 0618733965
• ISBN-13: 9780618733965
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The Namesake

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• Sep 1, 2003, 304 pages
• Sep 2004, 304 pages
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Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection, The Interpreter of Maladies, an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations.

Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies established this young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. Her stories are one of the very few debut works -- and only a handful of collections -- to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among the many other awards and honors it received were the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the highest critical praise for its grace, acuity, and compassion in detailing lives transported from India to America. In The Namesake , Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail -- the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase -- that opens whole worlds of emotion. The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name. Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves. The New York Times has praised Lahiri as "a writer of uncommon elegance and poise." The Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity.

1968 On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in a bowl. She adds salt, lemon juice, thin slices of green chili pepper, wishing there were mustard oil to pour into the mix. Ashima has been consuming this concoction throughout her pregnancy, a humble approximation of the snack sold for pennies on Calcutta sidewalks and on railway platforms throughout India, spilling from newspaper cones. Even now that there is barely space inside her, it is the one thing she craves. Tasting from a cupped palm, she frowns; as usual, there’s something missing. She stares blankly at the pegboard behind the countertop where her cooking utensils hang, all slightly coated with grease. She wipes sweat from her face with the free end of her sari. Her swollen feet ache against speckled gray linoleum. Her pelvis aches from the baby’s weight....

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• The Namesake opens with Ashima Ganguli trying to make a spicy Indian snack from American ingredients — Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts — but "as usual, there's something missing." How does Ashima try and make over her home in Cambridge to remind her of what she's left behind in Calcutta? Throughout The Namesake , how does Jhumpa Lahiri use food and clothing to explore cultural transitions — especially through rituals, like the annaprasan, the rice ceremony? Some readers have said that Lahiri's writing makes them crave the meals she evokes so beautifully. What memories or desires does Lahiri bring up for you? Does her writing ever make you "hunger"?
• The title The Namesake reflects the struggles Gogol Ganguli goes ...
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The Namesake

Jhumpa lahiri.

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The novel examines the nature of love and marriage by providing an intimate view into a series of Gogol’s romantic relationships, which are seen alongside the enduring, arranged marriage of his parents.

Gogol’s story is grounded in the marriage of his parents, Ashoke and Ashima , whose conception of love is founded in their shared past in India. Characterized by clearly defined gender roles and less openly displayed affection, but also a deep sense of loyalty and companionship, this relationship can be contrasted with Gogol’s romantic experiences. While Gogol has intense, influential, and openly sexual relationships with three different women over the course of the novel—outside of, and then, briefly, within a marriage—Ashima and Ashoke are one another’s sole romantic partners in life, as evidenced by the first meeting between them, which was arranged by Ashima’s family.

This reflects a difference between the two generations about the concept of married life. Gogol uses love as another means of rebelling against his past and trying to form his own identity, and the women he is drawn to at different points in the novel match his attitude toward that past. For him, love is something to be found independently. For Ashima and Ashoke, marriage was not an exercise in independence or forming identity, but was instead another step in the traditional Indian path in life, and one that led toward companionship and the growth of a family.

Although there is a traditional separation between Ashima and Ashoke that may appear as distance to an American reader—as in the moment of Gogol’s birth, when Ashoke waits outside the room while Ashima delivers his son—the intimacy between the two of them is clear from the respect and care they take with one another. By contrast, the relationship between Moushumi and Gogol is driven by Moushumi’s desire—which is greater even than Gogol’s own—to conform to a certain image of a modern American. She and Gogol never seem to relax into the idea that they might find their identity in one another, and dinner parties with her friends in Brooklyn, where Gogol feels awkward and out of place, signal a divide between them. Moushomi’s dissatisfaction with the marriage eventually leads to infidelity, and the two are divorced. Their need for independence is greater than their sense of loyalty or commitment to a family identity.

Ultimately, Lahiri seems to support a balance of these two drives when it comes to love and marriage. It is important that one feel capable of defining one’s identity independently, because love pursued as a means of finding stability or escape seems to fail, but it is equally important, and requires a different kind of courage, to attach oneself to a world created in collaboration with another person.

Love and Marriage ThemeTracker

Love and Marriage Quotes in The Namesake

When she calls out to Ashoke, she doesn’t say his name. Ashima never thinks of her husband’s name when she thinks of her husband, even though she knows perfectly well what it is. She has adopted his surname but refuses, for propriety’s sake, to utter his first. It’s not the type of thing Bengali wives do. Like a kiss or caress in a Hindi movie, a husband’s name is something intimate and therefore unspoken, cleverly patched over. And so … she utters the interrogative that has come to replace it, which translates roughly as “Are you listening to me?”

Ashima had never heard of Boston, or of fiber optics. She was asked whether she was willing to fly on a plane and then if she was capable of living in a city characterized by severe, snowy winters, alone. “Won’t he be there?” she’d asked, pointing to the man whose shoes she’d briefly occupied, but who had yet to say a word to her.

This is the house Ashoke had brought Ashima to eighteen months ago, late one February night after her arrival at Logan Airport. In the dark, through the windows of the taxi, wide awake from jet lag, she could barely make out a thing, apart from heaps of broken snow glowing like shattered, bluish white bricks on the ground. It wasn’t until morning, stepping briefly outside wearing a pair of Ashoke’s socks under her thin-soled slippers, the frigid New England chill piercing her inner ears and jaw, that she’d had her first real glimpse of America: Leafless trees with ice-covered branches. Dog urine and excrement embedded in the snow banks. Not a soul on the street.

At times… he is conscious of the fact that his immersion in Maxine’s family is a betrayal of his own. It isn’t simply the fact that his parents don’t know about Maxine… it is his knowledge that apart from their affluence, Gerald and Lydia are secure in a way his parents will never be. He cannot imagine his parents sitting at Lydia and Gerald’s table, enjoying Lydia’s cooking, appreciating Gerald’s selection of wine. He cannot imagine them contributing to one of their dinner party conversations. And yet here he is, night after night, a welcome addition to the Ratliff’s universe, doing just that.

Now, sitting together at the kitchen table at six-thirty every evening, the hour feeling more like midnight through the window, his father’s chair empty, this meatless meal is the only thing that makes sense. There is no question of skipping this meal; on the contrary, for ten evenings the three of them are strangely hungry, eager to taste the blandness on their plates.

It strikes him that there is no term for what they once were to each other. Their parents were friends, not they. She is a family acquaintance but she is not family. Their contact until tonight has been artificial, imposed, something like his relationship to his cousins in India but lacking even the justification of blood ties. Until they’d met tonight, he had never seen her outside the context of her family, or she his. He decides that it is her very familiarity that makes him curious about her, and as he begins to walk west, to the subway, he wonders when he might see her again.

He’d confessed to her that he still felt guilty at times for changing his name, more so now that his father was dead. And she’d assured him that it was understandable, that anyone in his place would have done the same. But now it’s become a joke to her. Suddenly he regrets having ever told Moushumi; he wonders whether she’ll proclaim the story of his father’s accident to the table as well. By morning, half the people in the room will have forgotten. It will be a tiny, odd fact about him, an anecdote, perhaps, for a future dinner party. This is what upsets him most.

She believed that he would be incapable of hurting her as Graham had. After years of clandestine relationships, it felt refreshing to court in a fishbowl, to have the support of her parents from the very start, the inevitability of an unquestioned future, of marriage, drawing them along. And yet the familiarity that had once drawn her to him has begun to keep her at bay. Though she knows it’s not his fault, she can’t help but associate him, at times, with a sense of resignation, with the very life she has resisted, has struggled so mightily to leave behind.

She wonders if she is the only woman in her family ever to have betrayed her husband, to have been unfaithful. This is what upsets her most to admit: that the affair causes her to feel strangely at peace, the complication of it calming her, structuring her day.

Ashima feels lonely suddenly, horribly, permanently alone, and briefly, turned away from the mirror, she sobs for her husband. She feels overwhelmed by the thought of the move she is about to make, to the city that was once home and is now in its own way foreign. She feels both impatience and indifference for all the days she still must live, for something tells her she will not go quickly as her husband did.

And then the house will be occupied by strangers, and there will be no trace that they were ever there, no house to enter, no name in the telephone directory. Nothing to signify the years his family has lived here, no evidence of the effort, the achievement it had been. It’s hard to believe that his mother is really going, that for months she will be so far. He wonders how his parents had done it, leaving their respective families behind, seeing them so seldom, dwelling unconnected, in a perpetual state of expectation, of longing.

It is as if a building he’d been responsible for designing had collapsed for all to see. And yet he can’t really blame her. They had both acted on the same impulse, that was their mistake. They had both sought comfort in each other, in their shared world, perhaps for the sake of novelty, or out of fear that that world was slowly dying. Still, he wonders how he’s arrived at all this… His time with her seems like a permanent part of him that no longer has any relevance, or currency. As if that time were a name he’d ceased to use.

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The Namesake

By jhumpa lahiri, the namesake essay questions.

Explain how the relationship between Ashoke, Ashima, and Gogol develops throughout the novel.

The theme of the relationship between parents and children becomes prominent, as Gogol grows old enough to interact with his parents as a child. During his young adulthood, Gogol is impatient with his parents and they, likewise, feel unable to relate to their American children. Gogol begins to feel tender toward his father after his death. He now understands the guilt and uselessness his parents had felt when their parents had passed away across the world, in Calcutta. When Ashima decides to spend half the year in Calcutta, Gogol considers what it took for his parents to live in the United States, so far from their own parents, and how he has always remained close to home; they bore it "with a stamina he fears he does not possess himself." He does not think he can bear being so far away from his mother for so long.

How is Gogol's name tied to his identity?

Gogol is not bothered by the unusual nature of his name until he is eleven and realizes, on a class trip to a cemetery, that his name is unique. He makes rubbings of the other gravestones with names he has never heard before because he relates to them. By his fourteenth birthday, Gogol has come to hate his name and resents being asked about it.

As far as Gogol's identity is linked to that of his father, Ashoke understands Gogol as representing the life that followed the horrible train accident he suffered in 1961. His name represents the life-saving book that Ashoke was clutching when he was rescued. Gogol does not understand that part of his identity fully until after his father's death.

Moushumi knows Gogol as "Gogol," and is surprised when he introduces himself as Nikhil at the bar. It is "the first time he's been out with a woman who'd once known him by that other name." He comes to like the sense of familiarity it creates between them. She still calls him Nikhil like everyone else in his life, but she knows the first name he ever had, and that seems like a secret bond between them. While Astrid, Donald, and the guests at the dinner party discuss what to name Astrid's baby, Moushumi reveals to the guests nonchalantly that Nikhil was not always named Nikhil. This offends him because it feels like a betrayal of an intimate detail only she knew to people he doesn't like.

How does the language barrier affect the Gangulis?

The language barrier that is to be the source of much struggle for Ashima and Ashoke is evident when they arrive at the hospital for Gogol's birth. After she has been given a bed, Ashima looks for her husband, but he has stepped behind the curtain around her bed. He says, "I'll be back" in Bengali, a language neither the nurses nor the doctor speaks. The curtain is a physical barrier, but it represents the symbolic barrier created by speaking Bengali in the United States.

Ashima and Ashoke send Sonia and Gogol to Bengali language and culture classes every other Saturday, but "it never fails to unsettle them, that their children sound just like Americans, expertly conversing in a language that still at times confounds them, in accents they are accustomed not to trust." In Chapter 8, after his date with Moushumi, Gogol makes the decision to speak to his taxi driver in Bengali. He feels the impulse to connect with another Indian after having embraced his childhood memories with Moushumi.

Discuss Ashima's feeling of alienation in the United States.

The theme of alienation, of being a stranger in a foreign land, is prominent throughout the novel. Throughout her pregnancy, which was difficult, Ashima was afraid about raising a child in "a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare." Her son, Gogol, will feel at home in the United States in a way that she never does. When Gogol is born, Ashima mourns the fact that he is not surrounded by her close family. It means that his birth, "like most everything else in America, feels somehow haphazard, only half true." When she arrives home from the hospital, Ashima says to Ashoke in a moment of angst, "I don't want to raise Gogol alone in this country. It's not right. I want to go back."

Ashima feels alienated in the suburbs; this alienation of being a foreigner is compared to "a sort of lifelong pregnancy," because it is "a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts... something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect."

When Ashima is living alone in the house on Pemberton Road and she does not like it at all. She "feels too old to learn such a skill. She hates returning in the evenings to a dark, empty house, going to sleep on one side of the bed and waking up on another."

Ashima feels alienated and alone after showering before the last Christmas party she throws at the house on Pemberton Road. She "feels lonely suddenly, horribly, permanently alone, and briefly, turned away from the mirror, she sobs for her husband." She feels "both impatience and indifference for all the days she still must live." She does not feel motivated to be in Calcutta with the family she left over thirty years before, nor does she feel excited about being in the United States with her children and potential grandchildren. She just feels exhausted and overwhelmed without her husband.

Besides Ashima, which characters are marked by alienation? How do they experience it?

Gogol also feels alienated, especially when he realizes that "no one he knows in the world, in Russia or India or America or anywhere, shares his name. Not even the source of his namesake." Gogol also feels alienated sometimes in his marriage to Moushumi. When he finds remnants of her life with Graham around the apartment they now share together, he wonders if "he represents some sort of capitulation or defeat." When they go to Paris together, he wishes it were her first time there, too, so he didn't feel so out of place while she feels so obviously comfortable.

When Maxine comes to stay with the Gangulis at the end of the mourning period for Ashoke, Gogol can tell "she feels useless, a bit excluded in this house full of Bengalis." It's the way he is used to feeling around her extended family and friends in New Hampshire.

The theme of alienation appears in Moushumi's life, as she describes to Gogol how she rejected all the Indian suitors with which her parents tried to set her up. She tells him, "She was convinced in her bones that there would be no one at all. Sometimes she wondered if it was her horror of being married to someone she didn't love that had caused her, subconsciously, to shut herself off." She went to Paris so she could reinvent herself without the confusion of where she fit in.

In what ways is the tension between the United States and Calcutta prominent?

As the Ganguli children grow up as Americans, their parents give in to certain American traditions. For his fourteenth birthday, Gogol has two celebrations: one that is typically American and one that is Bengali. The parents of Moushumi and Gogol plan their children's entire wedding, inviting people neither of them has met and engaging in rituals neither of them understands. They don't have the type of intimate, personal wedding their American friends would have planned.

The difference between Bengali and American approaches to marriage is clear in Ashima's evaluation of Gogol's divorce from Moushumi. She thinks, "Fortunately they have not considered it their duty to stay married, as the Bengalis of Ashoke and Ashima's generation do." In her view, the pressure to settle for less than "their ideal of happiness" has given way to "American common sense." Surprisingly, Ashima is pleased with this outcome, as opposed to an unhappy but dutiful marriage for her son.

How is the tension between life and death important in the relationship between Ashoke and Gogol?

Ashoke decides not to tell Gogol about his near-death experience on his son's fourteenth birthday because he realizes that Gogol is not able to understand it yet. This decision points to the tension between life and death: "Today, his son's birthday, is a day to honor life, not brushes with death. And so, for now, Ashoke decides to keep the explanation of his son's name to himself." As Gogol deals with the death of Ashoke, his father, he thinks about how he and Maxine "were already drunk from the book party, lazily sipping their beers, their cold cups of jasmine tea. All that time, his father was in the hospital, already dead." As Gogol takes the train from Boston back to his life in New York, he thinks of the train accident his father had been a victim in so long ago. The tension of life versus death is apparent to Gogol as he gets ready for his wedding. "Their shared giddiness, the excitement of the preparations, saddens him, all of it reminding him that his father is dead." His father's absence is apparent in contrast to the celebration of his new life with Moushumi.

What role does nostalgia play in Gogol's experience of the world?

Gogol feels nostalgic when his mother and Sonia come to the train station to see him off. He remembers that the whole family would see him off every time he returned to Yale as a college student; "his father would always stand on the platform until the train was out of sight." Gogol begins to feel more and more nostalgic as his marriage with Moushumi progresses. In Paris, he wishes he could stay in bed with Moushumi for hours like they used to, rather than having to sightsee by himself while she prepares for her presentation. During the dinner party at the home of Astrid and Donald, Gogol becomes nostalgic for when he and Moushumi were first dating and spent an entire afternoon designing their ideal house. As Sonia, Ben, Gogol, and Ashima assemble the fake Christmas tree together, Gogol remembers decorating the first plastic tree his parents had bought at his insistence.

What do the different women in Gogol's life represent to him?

Kim is the first woman Gogol kisses as a junior in high school. He tells her his name is Nikhil, because he feels that he could never seduce a woman as Gogol; this realization is one of the factors that contribute to his legal name change. Ruth is his first real girlfriend at Yale, and they grow apart when she is across the world studying at Oxford. The loss of this relationship represents the difficulty of maintaining a sense of closeness from across the world. He uses Maxine, with whom he lives in New York, as an escape from his parents and the world they represent. Bridget, a married woman with whom Gogol has an affair as he studies for his architecture exam, foreshadows the disintegration of his marriage to Moushumi because of an affair she will have. His wife, Moushumi, is exciting and new to him at first but she also represents a kind of settling for the life that both their parents want for them.

What is achieved by Lahiri's use of varying protagonists?

Although an omniscient third-person narrator narrates the whole novel, the protagonists vary from chapter to chapter. This allows Lahiri to paint a broad picture of the experiences of an entire family, developing the characters from the point of view of the other characters as well as from their own points of view. Rather than maintaining a single protagonist and characterizing the other characters only as they relate to that person, Lahiri creates layered characters with the use of varying points of view. Especially with regard to Moushumi and her affair with Dimitri, this technique makes the characters' actions more sympathetic, so the reader can relate to them.

The Namesake Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Namesake is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Chapter 7 and 8

Sonia is shocked and upset but is better deal with the death than others in the family. When Ashoke dies, she moves home to be with Ashima, leaving behind her life in San Francisco with little regret.

Why does Gogol only feel guilt as the train is leaving after breaking up with Bridget?

I think Gogol thinks of the husband that Bridget is going back to, the husband that they both betrayed.

THE AUTHOR USES THE WORD NIKHIL IS INCLUSIVE OF TWO CULTURES

You've provided all the necessary details... thank you! Nice work!

"Not only is it a perfectly respectable Bengali good name, meaning "he who is entire, encompassing all," but it also bears a satisfying resemblance to Nikolai, the first name of...

Study Guide for The Namesake

The Namesake study guide contains a biography of Jhumpa Lahiri, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Namesake
• The Namesake Summary
• Character List

Essays for The Namesake

The Namesake essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri.

• Gogol's Search for Greater Understanding
• The Apple and the Tree: Family Ties in The Namesake and Fences
• Overcoat Symbolism in The Namesake
• The Quest for Identity: Symbolic Intricacies
• Setting and Adaptation in The Namesake

Lesson Plan for The Namesake

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Namesake
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
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Progressive Originalism and the New Canon Wars

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Almas Khan, Progressive Originalism and the New Canon Wars, American Literary History , Volume 36, Issue 3, Fall 2024, Pages 809–814, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajae074

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This essay responds to Geoffrey Kirsch’s review essay “What’s Past is Prologue: Democracy in the Age of Originalism” by evaluating how the three texts Kirsch reviews—Kermit Roosevelt, III’s The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story (2022), Cass R. Sunstein’s How to Interpret the Constitution (2023), and D. Berton Emerson and Gregory Laski’s edited collection Democracies in America: Keywords for the Nineteenth Century and Today (2023)—engage with progressive originalism. Drawing inspiration from civil rights activists including Frederick Douglass, progressive originalists seek to recast an ostensibly conservative method of constitutional interpretation grounded in what the “founding fathers” or a historical public thought or intended. Roosevelt’s and Sunstein’s books reveal the potential and limits of both progressive originalism and insular disciplinary conversations about constitutional interpretation. Contrastingly, the multidisciplinary Democracies in America has a more expansive conception of whose voices should matter when interpreting the Constitution through a progressive originalist lens. A comparative analysis of the three books also demonstrates the value of literature and literary historians in an age characterized by the ascendancy of historical approaches to constitutional interpretation and a revival of the “canon wars.”

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Watch CBS News

Book excerpt: "The Fire Next Time" by James Baldwin

Updated on: August 11, 2024 / 9:34 AM EDT / CBS News

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Writer, poet and activist James Baldwin (1924-1987) was one of the leading literary voices of the civil rights movement. Through a powerful oeuvre of novels, plays and essays, he explored issues of race, class, politics and sexual identity during one of America's most turbulent periods.

Baldwin's essay "My Dungeon Shook," written in the form of a letter to his young nephew, was first published in The Progressive in 1962; the following year a revised version was included in "The Fire Next Time"  (now included in a new collection from Everyman's Library). The letter is a powerful treatise on the state of racism in America - how it affects Black people whose very dignity is circumscribed by social constructs, as well as whites undermined by their lack of understanding and their feelings of fear. It richly illustrates the ironies of how race relations can dampen the humanity of all involved.

Read the essay below, and don't miss Kelefa Sanneh's report on the centenary of James Baldwin on "CBS Sunday Morning" August 11!

"The Fire Next Time; Nobody Knows My Name; No Name in the Street; The Devil Finds Work" by James Baldwin

"My Dungeon Shook"

Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation

Dear James:

I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother. Like him, you are tough, dark, vulnerable, moody—with a very definite tendency to sound truculent because you want no one to think you are soft. You may be like your grandfather in this, I don't know, but certainly both you and your father resemble him very much physically. Well, he is dead, he never saw you, and he had a terrible life; he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him. This is one of the reasons that he became so holy. I am sure that your father has told you something about all that. Neither you nor your father exhibit any tendency towards holiness: you really are of another era, part of what happened when the Negro left the land and came into what the late E. Franklin Frazier called "the cities of destruction." You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a n----- . I tell you this because I love you, and please don't you ever forget it.

I have known both of you all your lives, have carried your Daddy in my arms and on my shoulders, kissed and spanked him and watched him learn to walk. I don't know if you've known anybody from that far back; if you've loved anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man, you gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort. Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's face as it is today are all those other faces which were his. Let him laugh and I see a cellar your father does not remember and a house he does not remember and I hear in his present laughter his laughter as a child. Let him curse and I remember him falling down the cellar steps, and howling, and I remember, with pain, his tears, which my hand or your grandmother's so easily wiped away. But no one's hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today, which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs. I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most of mankind is not all of mankind.) But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

Now, my dear namesake, these innocent and well-meaning people, your countrymen, have caused you to be born under conditions not very far removed from those described for us by Charles Dickens in the London of more than a hundred years ago. (I hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, "No! This is not true! How bitter you are!"—but I am writing this letter to you, to try to tell you something about how to handle them , for most of them do not yet really know that you exist. I know the conditions under which you were born, for I was there. Your countrymen were not there, and haven't made it yet. Your grandmother was also there, and no one has ever accused her of being bitter. I suggest that the innocents check with her. She isn't hard to find. Your countrymen don't know that she exists, either, though she has been working for them all their lives.)

Well, you were born, here you came, something like fifteen years ago; and though your father and mother and grandmother, looking about the streets through which they were carrying you, staring at the walls into which they brought you, had every reason to be heavyhearted, yet they were not. For here you were, Big James, named for me—you were a big baby, I was not—here you were: to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world. Remember that: I know how black it looks today, for you. It looked bad that day, too, yes, we were trembling. We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived. And now you must survive because we love you, and for the sake of your children and your children's children.

This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that, for the heart of the matter is here, and the root of my dispute with my country. You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason . The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and how you could do it) and where you could live and whom you could marry. I know your countrymen do not agree with me about this, and I hear them saying, "You exaggerate." They do not know Harlem, and I do. So do you. Take no one's word for anything, including mine—but trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear. Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words acceptance and integration. There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them . And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations. You, don't be afraid. I said that it was intended that you should perish in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed to go behind the white man's definitions, by never being allowed to spell your proper name. You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention; and, by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality. But these men are your brothers—your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.

You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you, James, and Godspeed.

Your uncle, James

       From "The First Next Time" by James Baldwin. Reprinted by arrangement with Modern Library, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 1962, 1963 by James Baldwin. Copyright renewed 1990, 1991 by Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart. 

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For more info:

• "The Fire Next Time; Nobody Knows My Name; No Name in the Street; The Devil Finds Work" by James Baldwin (Everyman's Library), in Hardcover, available via Amazon , Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org
• JamesBaldwinBooks.com (Penguin Random House)

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T Introduces

A New Line of Clothes Fit for Magical Rituals, or Just Errands

The debut women’s wear collection from Colleen Allen, formerly of the Row, was inspired by tarot cards.

The designer Colleen Allen, photographed at her studio in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood on May 6, 2024, with pieces from her first namesake collection. Credit... Ramona Jingru Wang

Supported by

By Emilia Petrarca

• Aug. 14, 2024

In T Introduces , a singular talent makes their debut.

While studying fashion at New York’s Parsons School of Design and later London’s Central Saint Martins — from which she graduated in 2019 — the designer Colleen Allen, 28, was drawn to men’s wear. It aligned with her tomboyish personal style (she grew up in Chicago with two older brothers, as well as a younger sister) and, having been taught how to sew as a child by her quilter grandmother, Nana Dot, she was more interested in tailoring than draping. She was also excited by the ways that masculine dress codes were being re-examined at the time, thanks to designers and celebrities such as Jonathan Anderson and Young Thug. “I wanted to be a part of that,” she says, “where it could really feel like you were doing something new.”

Upon leaving school, with an eight-month internship for Raf Simons at Calvin Klein already under her belt, she landed her dream job at the Row, where she helped establish and grow the brand’s men’s wear division. But in 2020, she says, she began to experience “this internal and external world shift where I realized that I wanted to do women’s wear.” Newly fascinated with tarot and the idea of the divine feminine, she was inspired by the Empress and High Priestess cards of the Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington , who, sometime around 1955, painted her own deck.

Allen’s first collection, which she debuted during New York Fashion Week last February, features a cotton velvet cloak with oversize Victorian proportions that looks like something one might wear to perform a ritual ceremony (or in Allen’s case, to run errands around Brooklyn, where she now lives). “It’s about taking up space and becoming this grand and dramatic presence,” she says. The palette of tangerine orange, snow white and blood red — which can also be found in Carrington’s work — is meant to be “energizing, transformational and consciousness elevating.” Allen chose highly textured fabrics for their durable nature and ability to hold deeply saturated color. She used Polartec fleece, for example, to fashion a sharply tailored red maxi-length skirt suit, which is washed to a cashmere-esque texture. “When you step out of your apartment and walk around in a full look like that,” she says, “I really hope it will make you feel like the most magical version of yourself.”

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