Odhiambo, David Nandi2017-04-112017-04-112017Odhiambo, David N. “James Baldwin’s Another Country as an Abstract Machine.” Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 52, no. 1, 2017, pp. 69–87., www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/pacicoasphil.52.1.0069.http://hdl.handle.net/10790/3017This article on James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country, examines how abstract machines diagram an unfolding flow of desires in a bipolar process of becoming that produces two distinct genres in Baldwin’s novel, a protest-literature narrative and an asubjective text. One abstract machine, described as a machinic assemblage by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, shapes the perceptions (cognition), significations (meaning), and language (representation) of a protest-literature narrative that takes place in Greenwich Village during the late 1950s. Embedded within this text is an abstract machine described by Deleuze and Guattari as a collective assemblage of enunciation. Its bipolar movement interrupts Baldwin’s novel by rupturing the stable surface with neurologically based emotions expressed by a chain of significations that enable it to become a new text, and in doing so, unbecome what it was. Consequently, this article examines how these abstract machines shape a novel that generates new meanings for the reader as a result of this encounter of discourses.19 pagesen-USPacific Coast Philology, Vol. 52, No. 1, 2017, pages 69-87. "James Baldwin’s Another Country as an Abstract Machine" by David N. Odhiambo, Copyright © 2017, Penn State University Press. This article is used by permission of The Pennsylvania State University Press.Baldwin, James, -- 1924-1987.CriticismAfrican American authors -- 20th centurySegregationRace discrimination -- United States.Journal