James Baldwins Turkish Decade

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 Baldwinrs"s "Turkish decade," Magdalena J. Zaborowska reveals the significant role that Turkish locales, cultures, and friends played in Baldwinrs"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 Baldwinrs"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 Baldwinrs"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 novelAnother Country(1962) and on two volumes of his essays,The Fire Next Time(1963) andNo Name in the Street(1972), and she explains how Baldwinrs"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 Baldwinrs"s Turkish Decadeexpands the knowledge of Baldwinrs"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.

"Magdalena J. Zaborowska's excellent scholarship unearths new and little-known material about James Baldwin's time in Turkey, particularly through her interviews with Baldwin's friends and colleagues in Istanbul. Her original analyses of Baldwin's work in the context of his Turkish experiences are also outstanding." -David Leeming, author of James Baldwin: A Biography 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.