Uploaded November 2020 | Updated September 2026, 18 minutes ago
James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade Revisited with Magdalena Zaborowska (U. Michigan) | Moderated by Ellen McLarney (Duke U.)
Presentation begins with opening remarks by Prof. Erdağ Göknar about the short film – James Baldwin: From Another Place by Sedat Pakay.
This is followed with a poem performed by CJ Suitt (Chapel Hill’s first poet laureate)
Prof. Zaborowska discussed aspects of James Baldwin’s life in Istanbul by revisiting her Duke U. Press book, James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade that came out 11 years ago. She outlines phases in Baldwin’s life that he chose based on homophobia and racism in the United States. Therefore, an alternative family of friends was formed through exploring exile in Turkey. Baldwin primarily lived in a small room and wrote exhaustively to finish his third novel – Another Country. The shared photos and knowledge highlighted here in this video is highly recommended to those interested in artists and black voices in Turkish society in the early 1960s.
Magdalena J. Zaborowska, Professor in the Departments of American Culture and Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, researches, writes on, and teaches literary and cultural studies approaches to intersections of social space and transatlantic discourses on race, nationality, (queer) sexuality, and gender; African American literature, life writing, material culture, immigrant ethnicities, feminist, and critical race theory; American Studies, post-totalitarian East-Central Europe. Author of James Baldwin's Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Duke University Press, 2009)
Prof. Zaborowska dedicated this talk to the memory of Sedat Pakay
James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade Revisited with Magdalena Zaborowska (U. Michigan) | Moderated by Ellen McLarney (Duke U.)
Presentation begins with opening remarks by Prof. Erdağ Göknar about the short film – James Baldwin: From Another Place by Sedat Pakay.
This is followed with a poem performed by CJ Suitt (Chapel Hill’s first poet laureate)
Prof. Zaborowska discussed aspects of James Baldwin’s life in Istanbul by revisiting her Duke U. Press book, James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade that came out 11 years ago. She outlines phases in Baldwin’s life that he chose based on homophobia and racism in the United States. Therefore, an alternative family of friends was formed through exploring exile in Turkey. Baldwin primarily lived in a small room and wrote exhaustively to finish his third novel – Another Country. The shared photos and knowledge highlighted here in this video is highly recommended to those interested in artists and black voices in Turkish society in the early 1960s.
Magdalena J. Zaborowska, Professor in the Departments of American Culture and Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, researches, writes on, and teaches literary and cultural studies approaches to intersections of social space and transatlantic discourses on race, nationality, (queer) sexuality, and gender; African American literature, life writing, material culture, immigrant ethnicities, feminist, and critical race theory; American Studies, post-totalitarian East-Central Europe. Author of James Baldwin's Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Duke University Press, 2009)
Prof. Zaborowska dedicated this talk to the memory of Sedat Pakay
