James Baldwin's Turkish Decade

Erotics of Exile

Autor: Zaborowska, Magdalena J.
Editor: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822341444
eISBN Pdf: 9780822392408
Lugar de publicación: Durham , Estados Unidos
Año de publicación digital: 2009
Mes: Enero
Páginas: 416
Idioma: Ingles

Descripción

Between 1961 and 1971 James Baldwin spent extended periods of time in Turkey, where he worked on some of his most important books. In this first in-depth exploration of Baldwin’s “Turkish decade,” Magdalena J. Zaborowska reveals the significant role that Turkish locales, cultures, and friends played in Baldwin’s life and thought. Turkey was a nurturing space for the author, who by 1961 had spent nearly ten years in France and Western Europe and failed to reestablish permanent residency in the United States. Zaborowska demonstrates how Baldwin’s Turkish sojourns enabled him to re-imagine himself as a black queer writer and to revise his views of American identity and U.S. race relations as the 1960s drew to a close.

Following Baldwin’s footsteps through Istanbul, Ankara, and Bodrum, Zaborowska presents many never published photographs, new information from Turkish archives, and original interviews with Turkish artists and intellectuals who knew Baldwin and collaborated with him on a play that he directed in 1969. She analyzes the effect of his experiences on his novel Another Country (1962) and on two volumes of his essays, The Fire Next Time (1963) and No Name in the Street (1972), and she explains how Baldwin’s time in Turkey informed his ambivalent relationship to New York, his responses to the American South, and his decision to settle in southern France. James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade expands the knowledge of Baldwin’s role as a transnational African American intellectual, casts new light on his later works, and suggests ways of reassessing his earlier writing in relation to ideas of exile and migration.

Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface: Sightings
Acknowledgments
Introduction: From Harlem to Istanbul
One. Between Friends: Looking for Baldwin in Constantinople
Two. Queer Orientalisms in Another Country
Three. Staging Masculinity in Düşenin Dostu
Four. East to South: Homosexual Panic, the Old Country, and No Name in the Street
Conclusion: Welcome Tables East and West
Notes
Bibliography
Index