Synopses & Reviews
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 Baldwinandrsquo;s andldquo;Turkish decade,andrdquo; Magdalena J. Zaborowska reveals the significant role that Turkish locales, cultures, and friends played in Baldwinandrsquo;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 Baldwinandrsquo;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 Baldwinandrsquo;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 Baldwinandrsquo;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 Baldwinandrsquo;s Turkish Decade expands the knowledge of Baldwinandrsquo;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.
Review
andldquo;Of central importance is how Baldwin's so-called Turkish exile helped distance him from, while also focusing, his massive contradictions within a society of contradictions. . . . . Zaborowska . . . displays the fascinating, delicious thrill she received from the people she interviewed.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Zaborowska is a charming companion as she follows Baldwinandrsquo;s steps through Turkey, brimming with enthusiasm at the sights and at the warmth of her reception by his friends. . . . [S[he makes us feel how necessary such a refuge was as the sixties wore on.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;[I]nformative and enlightening. . . . Zaborowskaandrsquo;s work will appeal to fans of Baldwin looking for an interesting take on the manandrsquo;s life. . . . Her dedication and passion does shine through in the time and effort she placed in writing this book. . . .andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Zaborowska takes great delight in detailing her subject's adventures in Turkey, vicariously bathing in the limelight of a distinguished, outspoken writer who pushed boundaries well before his time, and graced the homosexual world with writing that transcended both color and gender lines.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;[Zaborowska] scours [Baldwinandrsquo;s] works for hints of Istanbul; she visits his stomping grounds and entertainingly interviews various Turkish luminaries. . . . [H]er reporting reveals as much about Turkey as it does about Baldwin, as well as the connections between this fledgling nation and the growing shadow America had begun to cast across the globe.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Zaborowskaandrsquo;s book will make you want to reread Another Country and his later works with a new context of understanding. The book illuminates, with a scholarandrsquo;s focus and a writerandrsquo;s nuance, how Baldwinandrsquo;s exile in Istanbul was not simply a theme or escape from the racism and homophobia of the U.S., but also a deeply felt condition crucial to his intellectual and creative imagination. Indeed, the book reminds us that some of the most poignant and insightful writings about sexuality and race in the canon of American literature were composed well beyond our shores.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Zaborowskaandrsquo;s determined research and sharp interpretations recast Baldwinandrsquo;s entire life project and show how his Turkish sojourn rendered American conceptions of sexuality, race, and citizenship more clearly. [A] beautifully imagined book. . . . Zaborowska shows the discontiguous routes of one particular writer to that destination and beyond it. In doing so, she reminds us that often the destination is as displaced as the traveler.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Magdalena Zaborowska persuasively argues that Baldwinandrsquo;s Turkish yearsandmdash;1961 and 1971andmdash;are key to understanding his career. . . . I found her deceptively simple argument arresting: although the broad outlines of Baldwinandrsquo;s Turkish years are well known, to date, no scholar has set out to foreground place and atmosphere of composition so extensively.andrdquo;
Synopsis
"Drawing on oral history, archival research, literary analysis, cultural studies, and personal narrative/(auto)ethnography, Magdalena J. Zaborowska renders a multitextured reading of James Baldwin's years in Istanbul. No one else has so thoroughly examined the influence of those years on Baldwin's work, and anyone who comes after will have to cite Zaborowska. And I dare say that no one will be able to capture this story as well as she has. "James Baldwin's Turkish Decade" will change the field of Baldwin studies."--E. Patrick Johnson, co-editor of "Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology"
Synopsis
Shows that the decade Baldwin spent in Turkey is crucial to evaluating his contribution to American letters, especially to understanding the interdependence of race and the erotic in constructions of American identity.
About the Author
Magdalena J. Zaborowska is Associate Professor in the Program in American Culture and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of How We Found America: Reading Gender through East-European Immigrant Narratives; the editor of Other Americans, Other Americas: The Politics and Poetics of Multiculturalism; and a co-editor of Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures Through an East-West Gaze and The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Preface: Sightings xiii
Acknowledgments xxv
Introduction: From Harlem to Istanbul 1
1. Between Friends: Looking for Baldwin in Constantinople 31
2. Queer Orientalisms in Another Country 91
3. Staging Masculinity in Dusenin Dostu 141
4. East to South: Homosexual Panic, the Old Country, and No Name in the Street 197
Conclusion: Welcome Tables East and West 249
Notes 265
Bibliography 331
Index 359