“A Kind of Joy”: Laughing and Grinning through “Sonny’s Blues”
Nikopoulos J.
1 September 2022Manchester University Press
James Baldwin Review
2022#8Issue 151 - 65 pp.
The protagonists in James Baldwin’s 1957 short story “Sonny’s Blues” are constantly smiling and laughing. The story’s narrator notices these gestures and utilizes them to grasp at clarity when clarity seems out of reach. This article examines the narrator’s focus on this duo of facial expressions which reliably denote positive emotion. The relationship we maintain between our smiles and our laughter structures many of the narrator’s interactions with the story’s hero. More though, this relationship between smiles, laughter, and a kind of joy resembles the relationship Baldwin has described between the blues and the world this genre of music depicts.
affect , African American , emotion , humor , nonverbal communication
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The Department of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature, Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan
The Department of Languages
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