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Me and My House: James Baldwin's Last Decade in France

by Magdalena J. Zaborowska

Duke University Press, 2018
eISBN: 978-0-8223-7234-9 | Cloth: 978-0-8223-6924-0 | Paper: 978-0-8223-6983-7
Library of Congress Classification PS3552.A45Z985 2018

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

ABOUT THIS BOOK

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 Accessible, heavily illustrated, and drawing on interviews with Baldwin's friends and lovers, unpublished letters, and manuscripts, Me and My House offers new insights into Baldwin's life, writing, and relationships, making it essential reading for all students,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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

REVIEWS

"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."

-- Kirkus Reviews

"Zaborowska takes you on an intricate journey in which she explores the central theme of home and what this means in terms of identity and belonging. . . . This book contains vast details of Baldwin’s life in France – full of stunning photographs and beautifully illustrated, it draws on interviews with those closest to him and unpublished letters and works. It dissects, analyses and tries to understand the life lived by Baldwin, particularly how the relationship between social space and architecture is linked to race. It enables readers to reassess the richness and complexity of his writing and gives them an opportunity to understand the man behind the work. . . ."

-- Kalwant Bhopal Times Higher Education

"Relying on extensive interviews with Baldwin’s friends and lovers, manuscripts, and unpublished letters, Zaborowska introduces new insights into the writer’s life and work. Me And My House is an essential read for both serious students and scholars, but also fans wishing to know more about the life and motivations of this iconic master."

-- The Advocate

" [An] extremely sensitive, thorough and well-informed appraisal of Baldwin’s final French sojourn by one of the leading scholars of the writer’s work and life."

-- Claudine Raynaud European Journal of American Culture

“Zaborowska describes in full, rich detail the actual home that Baldwin established in the south of France, recreating its physical qualities and also the extraordinary community he assembled there. . . . The image of Baldwin that emerges from this book is therefore quite different from the isolated stranger that previous studies have established.”

-- Robert Butler African American Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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

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