Fremder im Dorf / Schwarzer Körper

James Baldwin first travelled to Leukerbad in the summer of 1951, which, the writer thought, would offer few distractions and therefore ideal conditions for writing. The six hundred people who live in the Valais village surrounded by mountains, where there is no cinema, no bank, no library and no theatre, have never seen a black man before, and the children shout "N***r!" after him. Baldwin returns twice more in the winter, completes his first novel here and writes the essay "A Stranger in the Village", which appears in Harper's Magazine in 1953. Based on the experience of being the only black person in a village inhabited exclusively by white people, Baldwin writes about racism and the history of white supremacy. More than sixty years later, in the summer of 2014, Teju Cole travelled to Leukerbad with Baldwin's essay in his luggage. In "Black Body", Cole enters into a dialogue with Baldwin. Are the older people he meets on the street the children from back then? The village has grown. Cole is not an "astonishing sight" and is not exposed to furtive glances any more often than in Zurich or New York. Sixty years separate the two authors, a place brings them together, and although things have changed, the racism persists.