Me and My House: James Baldwin’s Last Decade in France by Magdalena J. Zaborowska

Abstract

In Me and My House: James Baldwin’s Last Decade in France, Magdalena J. Zaborowska delivers a wide-ranging argument for the influence of James Baldwin’s final home in St. Paul-de-Vence in the South of France on his late works. The book follows her similarly site-specific monograph, James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Duke UP, 2009). Me and My House’s greatest strengths lie in Zaborowska’s curatorial impulse, or what she likens to the “vitrine” (43–45), or display. This creative practice from her childhood spent in Cold War Poland involved her and her friends each digging a hole in the ground in which to create whimsical artworks from found materials; they would then place a piece of glass over their art, creating a “vitrine,” and bury their projects to reveal to one another at a later time. Zaborowska links this playful approach to Baldwin’s own oeuvre, but such assemblages also provide a strong analogue for her own critical method in Me and My House, in which she gathers together and displays for the reader a sweeping array of Baldwin’s materials focused on his last years, from 1971–1987, across media and visual cultures.