Me and my house : James Baldwin's last decade in France
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Me and my house : James Baldwin's last decade in France
Duke University Press, 2018
- : hardcover
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [351]-376) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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 Accessible, heavily illustrated, and drawing on interviews with Baldwin's friends and lovers, unpublished letters, and manuscripts, Me and My House offers new insights into Baldwin's life, writing, and relationships, making it essential reading for all students,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.
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
by "Nielsen BookData"
