Black Matters of Value: James Baldwin’s Dissenting Domesticity

• In Event: Spaces of Dissent

Abstract

This paper explores a digital humanities project – a writer’s house-museum for James Baldwin (1924-87) – the Civil Rights Movement activist, black queer intellectual who lived internationally, and one of the most important twentieth-century American writers. Currently in progress for the platform of the National Museum of African American History and Culture/Smithsonian, it complements my forthcoming book, Me and My House: James Baldwin and Black Domesticity (Duke UP, 2017), and focuses on documenting and making accessible to students, researchers, and fans Baldwin’s last home residence, “Chez Baldwin,” in St. Paul-de-Vence in France, where he spent his last sixteen years and where he created his most enduring household. I investigated and documented the structure in 2000, when the house was still filled with the writer’s possessions, and returned there in 2014, after it had been lost to developers, just before its partial demolition. Invited to study an archive of objects salvaged from the house by a Baldwin family friend, I have followed Toni Morrison’s approach to writing as “literary archeology,” where memory, imagination, and language create continuities in black lives past and present.
Our technologically rich and racially tense historical moment compels my central argument that the very matter, traces, and objects of black lives demand rigorous documentation and study, and are central to rethinking narratives of American national identity. Though the Chez Baldwin artifacts I have studied were abandoned as debris and refuse, I read them as central to his daily life as a writer: his voluminous library, foreign editions of his works, files he used to research his writings, phone logs, photographs, journals and magazines, vinyl records, art pieces and posters, and one of his typewriters. These objects are the only surviving archive of Baldwin’s life matter and provide rich evidence of his black queer dwelling practices that were key to the composition of his important later works. Their documentation in my project helps to resist the material erasure of Baldwin’s life in the United States and France, while also elucidating unequal valuations of black and white literary legacies.
Situating itself in between the imperatives of Baldwin’s literary apparatus – biography, life writing, auto-ethnography, and genre experimentation – and material and visual culture narratives arising from his home site that inflected his late authorship, “Archiving” invites its audiences to follow the enduring traces of his writing life by means of a virtual tour of his last abode that leads to two levels of narrative commentary. Interweaving digital pictorial and video-recorded documentation of the house, its interiors, and grounds, the visual tour highlights architectural detail, garden, and salvaged objects. The two narrative levels accessible through several portals within the visual tour provide deeper contextualization and analysis of the site, offering vignettes of literary and biographical commentary and a life-writing-inflected account detailing the chronology, methods, processes, and approaches to documenting and discovering the house’s history via on site research, interviews with the author’s friends, family members, and correspondence with various actors in his life.

Author

• Magdalena J Zaborowska, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor