GENER AL INTEREST
Me and My House
James Baldwin’s Last Decade in France magdalena j . z aborowsk a
The last sixteen years of James Baldwin’s
Magdalena J. Zaborowska is
life (1971–1987) unfolded in a village in
Professor of Afroamerican and American studies and the John Rich
the south of France, in a sprawling house
Faculty Fellow at the Institute for
nicknamed “Chez Baldwin.” In Me and My
Me and My House
JAMES BALDWIN’S LAST DECADE IN FRANCE
the Humanities at the University of
House Magdalena J. Zaborowska employs
Michigan, and the author and coedi‑
Baldwin’s home space as a lens through
tor of several books, including James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics
which to expand his biography and explore the politics and poetics of blackness, queerness, and domesticity in his com‑ plex and underappreciated later works.
of Exile, also published by Duke University Press, and How We Found America: Reading Gender through East European Immigrant Narratives.
Zaborowska shows how the themes of dwelling and black queer male sexuality in The Welcome Table, Just Above My Head, Magdalena J. Zaborowska
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 Accessible, heavily illustrated, and drawing on interviews with Baldwin’s friends and lovers, unpublished letters, and manuscripts, Me and My House offers new insights into Baldwin’s life, writing, and relationships, making it essential reading for all students,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. “The thing that startles, the trick that steals the breath as one reads Me and My House, is Magdalena J. Zaborowska’s unrelenting insistence that James Baldwin was an embodied, social, thriving, and multifaceted individual deeply enmeshed in a vibrantly complicated domesticity. Not only does Zaborowska break through hackneyed accounts of Baldwin’s isolation but she also disrupts the clumsy boundaries that separate critic from reader and fiction from criticism, allowing us to understand the work of James Baldwin as not simply material to be studied but also as a bright model for the production of our own social and cultural critique.”— ROBERT F. REID-PHARR , author of Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique
also by Magdalena J. Zaborowska
James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile paper, $28.95 / £23.99 978-0-8223-4167-3 / 2009 Available as an e-book
A F R I C A N A M E R I C A N S T U D I E S / L I T E R AT U R E
April 400 pages, 104 illustrations, including 24 in color paper, 978‑0‑8223‑6983‑7, $28.95tr/£23.99 cloth, 978‑0‑8223‑6924‑0, $104.95/£87.00 Available as an e‑book
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