James Baldwin’s Hypothetical Novel: “Ignorant Armies” and the Making of Another Country

This article presents a genealogy of James Baldwin’s novel Another Country through a series of archival manuscripts dating from 1944. It argues that the nearly two-decades writing process informs a central theme of Another Country : the painful self-knowledge that comes from self-confrontation. The article offers this explanation to complement other contemporary interpretations of this theme of self-knowledge, particularly those of Mikko Tuhkanen and E. J. Martínez.