Film, Media and Music
Despite his several long periods of residence in Istanbul, James Baldwin published little about his experiences there. Visual documentation, however, is abundant—much more so than for any other place associated with Baldwin—because of the Turkish-American photographer Sedat Pakay. Although better known for his short film James Baldwin: From Another Place (1973), Pakay also took scores of still photographs of Baldwin. This article draws on the work of Magdalena J. Zaborowska and includes previously unpublished and rarely exhibited works. Selected from Pakay’s extensive archives, these photographs illustrate the comfort and freedom Baldwin found in Istanbul, which led to his most productive period.
On May 7, 1963, Baldwin appeared at his first major event during a loaded and intense western tour for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a speech at the packed Harmon Gymnasium on the U.C. Berkeley campus. Published estimates measured the crowd to be between 7,000 and 9,000. While he had been a committed member of CORE for years and had toured and appeared on the organization’s behalf, throughout the 1963 West Coast tour Baldwin took on a role and summoned a force quite beyond anything he had been involved in before. This speech allows us to track Baldwin’s shifting sense of engagement while the civil rights movement changed rapidly in multiple directions and as Baldwin’s notoriety grew. The transcription below has been prepared by Ed Pavlić and Justin A. Joyce. Vocal emphasis has been captured with italics. Significant pauses, interruptions, and non-word interjections have been captured in editorial brackets.
Drawing upon work from translation studies that posits the precariousness of living between languages, this article explores how the French–English bilingualism in Henry James’s The Ambassadors (1909) and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) foregrounds the identity fissures that arise in their American protagonists when they arrive in Europe. In both novels, language plays a key role in mining the inner worlds of protagonists preoccupied with lives they fear they haven’t lived; these preoccupations intersect with race, nationality, sexuality, and class. Although other scholars have previously used these four identity markers as entry points into exploring these novels, this article includes multilingualism in the nexus to argue that language offers a visible and textual platform through which the mediation of identity can take place.
This chapter focusses on unfilmed scripts, and thus analyses the written word only. It defends the inclusion of Bartolomé’s unfilmed scripts as vital to the recovery of the director’s work for Spanish film and transnational feminist film historiographies. To do so, it deploys recent unproduction studies scholarship, especially a methodology of ‘speculation’ (Field 2022) and defence of the ‘incomplete’ (Beeston and Soloman 2023). It therefore analyses the scripts of Qué tal Margarita… pero bien / What’s Up Margarita…? Not Bad (1974) and La linda Casilda / The Beautiful Casilda (1976) to speculate concerning the images of female experience in these films (including what would have been highly original treatments of post-natal depression and suicide). It also considers the evidence for the filming techniques that are hinted at, which suggest a connection to contemporary feminist counter-cinema. Within these techniques, it also pays attention to the sounds that audiences might have heard.