Literature and Theatre
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 This article draws on the work of Magdalena J. Zaborowska and includes previously unpublished and rarely exhibited works.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.
By situating Baldwin’s Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems in conversation with Jericho Brown’s 2019 poetry collection The Tradition, this article examines the theory of love in their poetic thinking. It argues that in their poetry, love emerges as a multifaceted mode of knowing and feeling, grounded in corporeal intensity and imbued with sociopolitical and historical meanings. Both Baldwin and Brown view love as integral to the understanding of queer sexuality and racial politics, foregrounding at the same time the challenges of loving and being loved in a historically anti-Black society. Their poetics of love coalesces the intellectual and the affective, the erotic and the political, moving beyond the conventions of inward-bound and personal lyric toward what Martinican philosopher and novelist Édouard Glissant termed a “poetics of relation.” Such transgenerational reading also allows us to explore Baldwin’s and Brown’s poetry as acutely attuned to historical moments which seem strikingly similar: Reagan’s and Trump’s presidencies.