The last sixteen years of James Baldwin's life (1971–87) unfolded in a village in the South of France, in a sprawling house nicknamed “Chez Baldwin.” In Me and My House Magdalena J. Zaborowska employs Baldwin’s home space as a lens through which to expand his biography and explore the politics and poetics of blackness, queerness, and domesticity in his complex and underappreciated later works. Zaborowska shows how the themes of dwelling and black queer male sexuality in The Welcome Table, Just above My Head, and If Beale Street Could Talk directly stem from Chez Baldwin's influence on the writer. The house was partially torn down in 2014. Accessible, heavily illustrated, and drawing on interviews with Baldwin's friends and lovers, unpublished letters, and manuscripts, Me and My House offers new insights into Baldwin's life, writing, and relationships, making it essential reading for all students, scholars, and fans of Baldwin.
Les mer
Magdalena J. Zaborowska uses James Baldwin's house in the south of France as a lens through which to reconstruct his biography and to explore the politics and poetics of blackness, queerness, and domesticity in his complex and underappreciated later works.
Les mer
Abbreviations  ix Acknowledgments  xi Introduction. If I Am a Part of the American House, and I Am: Vitrines, Fragments, Reassembled Remnants  1 1. Foundations, Facades, and Faces: Through the Glass Blackly, or Domesticating Claustrophobic Terror  51 2. Home Matter: No House in the World, or Reading Transnational, Black Queer Domesticity in St. Paul-de-Vence  85 3. Life Material: Haunted Houses and Welcome Tables, or The First Teacher, the Last Play, and Affectations of Disidentification  145 4. Building Metaphors: "Sitting in the Strangest House I Have Ever Known," or Black Heterotopias from Harlem to San Juan, to Paris, London, and Yonkers  213 5. Black Matters of Value: Erasure, Overlay, Manipulation, or Archiving the Invisible House  295 Notes  317 Bibliography  351 Index  377
Les mer
"Zaborowska's readings into Baldwin's work are thoughtful and illuminating. An opinionated and passionate book on one of the 20th century's most important writers."
“Magdalena J. Zaborowska is one of the foremost experts in the world on James Baldwin. Given her unparalleled access to an unusually substantial amount of source material and her deep knowledge of her subject, Me and My House offers rich new material and fresh ways of understanding Baldwin's relationship with writers, artists, and activists. Specialists and general readers alike will find this book engaging and enlightening.”
Les mer

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780822369837
Publisert
2018-04-27
Utgiver
Vendor
Duke University Press
Vekt
590 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Aldersnivå
01, G, P, 01, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet

Biographical note

Magdalena J. Zaborowska is Professor of Afroamerican and American Studies and the John Rich Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, and the author and coeditor of several books, including James Baldwin's Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile, also published by Duke University Press, and How We Found America: Reading Gender through East European Immigrant Narratives.