JAMES BALDWIN

A tribute to an influential queer Black trailblazer.

Part of Yale University Press’ Black Lives series, academic and Baldwin authority Zaborowska’s gracefully impassioned biography of the queer author and activist’s life and legacy focuses on his intimate social and professional intercourse, his travels, and the evolution of his sexuality. Formatted like an album on vinyl, the book intensively explores Baldwin’s private life through a succession of record “sides” and “tracks.” She makes great use of archival information on Baldwin, his emerging humanistic philosophy, as well as the diversity of his distinguished literary oeuvre, the expanse and importance of his home in France until his death, and a trove of unpublished writings that spin a fresh perspective on her subject’s artistic evolution and how he lived life outside of the public eye. Through the lens of Black queer humanism, which Zaborowska believes has the power to “connect Baldwin’s time to ours,” she pinpoints and highlights the episodes and formative influences occurring in Baldwin’s domestic life. These influences include his upbringing in Harlem; many impressionable early educators; his beloved mother’s presence; his pious stepfather’s brutality; various sexuality, identity, and gender struggles; and political lessons learned from Black feminists. All of these were artistically channeled into the creation of his essays, novels, and confessional notes that formed the heft and enduring impact of his legacy. Readers seeking a linear biographical timeline of Baldwin’s artistic and personal life will not find it here, but will instead delightfully discover Baldwin’s existence brilliantly and honorably “remixed” by Zaborowska. Her book vividly celebrates the “auto-ethnographical repetition” and “cyclical, achronological narrative style” of Baldwin’s timeless writings and enthusiastically reassembles his personal life by spotlighting the intimate, intensive, formative moments that shaped him as a queer Black artist and a man.

A creatively conceived appreciation for a decorated life and its far-flung influences on race, queer culture, and art.