Papers by Magdalena Zaborowska
9th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd'23)
Two undergraduate courses (2020-23) introduce students interested in the humanities and computing... more Two undergraduate courses (2020-23) introduce students interested in the humanities and computing to the life, works, and intellectual and material legacy of the world-famous African American writer and activist James Baldwin (1924-1987). Cross-listed with the Afroamerican, American Culture, Digital Studies, and English Departments, these courses utilize an open-access digital collection documenting Baldwin’s life and his selected works. Through innovative and experiential application of literary history in conversation with the emerging fields of Black Digital Studies and Black Digital Humanities, students develop projects that build (and build on) a growing, open-access archive. Published on the ArcGIS StoryMaps platform, these projects achieve two important higher-education goals: (1) They produce student-driven knowledge on an internationally renowned Black figure accessible to non-academic users; and (2) they confirm the importance of humanities and diversity literacy as invalu...
Literature and history, Sep 14, 2019
Awaited eagerly by this reader, and many in the fields of American Literature and African America... more Awaited eagerly by this reader, and many in the fields of American Literature and African American and Black Studies, this exciting book is the first (to my knowledge) comprehensive study of the cultural and stylistic foundations of the African American essay. Taking as her inspiration Zora Neale Hurston's claim that the 'will to adorn' characteristic of black English changed how southern whites spoke by transforming not only their language but also their attitude towards it, Wall builds a deep and complex cultural history of the genre while offering groundbreaking theoretical analyses and interpretations of its great practitioners and shapers. A sweeping panorama that portrays the essay as a vehicle for the 'subject that has preoccupied black writers for three centuries' (p. 217)-freedom-this book delights with rigorously researched analyses and painstaking close readings that span literary productions from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The Prologue builds the book's theoretical scaffolding on feminist assertions of margin-to-centre movement and Georg Luka´cs's claim that the essay's main focus is the reader-engaging 'process of the judging', rather than the verdict. Wall deftly weaves Kenneth Cmiel's concept of the genre's 'democratic eloquence' and Ralph Ellison's approach to the 'vernacular as a dynamic process' and reconfirms that 'the personal and political. .. [are] mutually constitutive' in such an essayistic process (pp. 7-9). The first chapter takes on Orlando Patterson's idea of freedom as possession embodied by the enslaved to sketch a deep history of the genre, whose roots can be found in a text by a free black known only as Othello, 'An Essay on Negro Slavery' (1788). The second chapter examines capacious archives of oratory, newspapers and pamphlets of the nineteenth century's 'voices of thunder', in Henry Highland Garnet's phrase. In addition to Garnet, it reads Maria Stewart, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Jesse Fauset and Frances Watkins Harper. By discussing male and female writers as equally important and in dialogue-the inclusive critical mode that operates seamlessly throughout the whole book-Wall rejects the tradition of monograph writing in which the so-called 'gender chapter', one devoted to women alone, dubiously adorns content that ad nauseam recycles the idea of heteropatriarchal origins of African American literary history. In Chapter Three, On Freedom moves through the fascinating literary landscapes of the Harlem Renaissance. Engaging equally the conflicts over conceptualisations of race expressed in Alain Locke's 'The New Negro' (1925) and James Weldon Johnson's preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), Wall explores the period's preoccupation with often essentialising ideas of racial or 'Negro art'. In her analysis, she does not shy away from engaging George Schuyler's notorious 'The Negro-Art Hokum' (1926) and extolls the value of taking the 'jagged harmonies' of Hurston's 'Art and Such' (1938) as both a critical and artistic model (pp. 109-110). Along with Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes and others, these early twentieth-century masters of the essay laid the ground for
James Baldwin Review, Sep 29, 2020
Rebranding James Baldwin and His Queer Others" was a session held at the annual meeting of the Am... more Rebranding James Baldwin and His Queer Others" was a session held at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association in November 2019 in Honolulu, Hawaii. The papers gathered here show how Baldwin's writings and life story participate in dialogues with other authors and artists who probe issues of identity and identification, as well as with other types of texts and non-American stories, boldly addressing theoretical and political perspectives different from his own. Nick Radel's temporal challenge to reading novels on homoerotic male desire asks of us a leap of faith, one that makes it possible to read race as not necessarily a synonym for "Black, " but as a powerful historical and sexual trope that resists "over-easy" binaries of Western masculinity. Ernest L. Gibson's engagement with Beauford Delaney's brilliant art and the ways in which it enabled the teenage Baldwin's "dark rapture" of self-discovery as a writer reminds us that "something [has been missing] in our discussions of male relationships. " Finally, Nigel Hatton suggests "a relationship among Baldwin, Denmark, and Giovanni's Room that adds another thread to the important scholarship on his groundbreaking work of fiction that has impacted African-American literature, Cold War studies, transnational American studies, feminist thought, and queer theory. " All three essays enlarge our assessment of Baldwin's contribution to understanding the ways gender and sexuality always inflect racialized Western masculinities. Thus, they help us work to better gauge the extent of Baldwin's influence right here and right now.
Assimilation or Transnationalism? Conceptual Models of the Immigrant Experience in America is par... more Assimilation or Transnationalism? Conceptual Models of the Immigrant Experience in America is part of the 2005 Annual Proceedings of The Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy.
Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2016
This essay reads two strange bedfellows who employ Paris as an architectural and narrative refere... more This essay reads two strange bedfellows who employ Paris as an architectural and narrative referent to re-script Western cultural identity. In Giovanni's Room (1956), James Baldwin deploys a story of a 'maid's room'/closet to deconstruct post-World War II Americanness as racialized/sexualized and transnational. In The Arcades Project (1927-40), Walter Benjamin celebrates the covered passage as a structural symbol of the "capital of the nineteenth century." Reading Benjamin through Baldwin in our own troubled century helps us to see how the histories of transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and ethnic genocides shaped American and Western stories, spaces, and selves.
Cr-the New Centennial Review, 2016
I was not born to be what someone said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else, but b... more I was not born to be what someone said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else, but by myself, and myself only. No true account, really, of black life can be held, can be contained in the American vocabulary. . . . I don’t see anything in American life—for myself—to aspire to. Nothing at all. It’s all so very false. So shallow, so plastic, so morally and ethically corrupt. —James Baldwin, “The Last Interview”
American Literature, 2013
Teksty Drugie, 1999
Budowle z czasów zimnej wojny Pałac z baśni pow staje w W arszawie B ęd zie trwał jak m iło ść do... more Budowle z czasów zimnej wojny Pałac z baśni pow staje w W arszawie B ęd zie trwał jak m iło ść do d zieck a B ęd zie trwał jak m iło ść rad zieck a.1
Palimpsest, 2015
Rufus’s destination is the George Washington Bridge at the edge of Harlem and Washington Heights,... more Rufus’s destination is the George Washington Bridge at the edge of Harlem and Washington Heights, from which he jumps to his death in an attempt both to break free from the racist house of bondage of segregated America of the 1950s and to escape the destruction he brought upon himself and his white Southerner lover, Leona. The chains binding American blacks and whites that he notices on his last subway ride give his story a pluralistic, social, and national dimension. While the name of the place of Rufus’s demise hails one of America’s Founding Fathers and its first president, his suicidal leap, like so many other anonymous exits all over the world, leaves no traces. essays
Architectural Theory Review, Apr 1, 2005
Page 1. Zabniowska From Baldwin's Paris to Benjamin's: the Architectonics of Race and S... more Page 1. Zabniowska From Baldwin's Paris to Benjamin's: the Architectonics of Race and Sexuality in Giovanni's Room. MAGDALENA J. ZABOROWSKA This essay reads two strange bedfellows who employ Paris as an architectural ...
American Studies in Scandinavia, Mar 1, 1997
Tlic narrative of David Levii~slcy's acculturation in Abraham Cahan's 1917 novcl, Tlze Rise of Da... more Tlic narrative of David Levii~slcy's acculturation in Abraham Cahan's 1917 novcl, Tlze Rise of David Levinsky, is Ssamcd by its first-person PI-otagonisl-narrator's rellections about the somewhat ambivalent effects of his Americanization. The book opens with Levinsly's contemplation of his truly American "metamorphosis" from a poor East European Jewish peddler into a millionaire, which "strilce[sl him as nothing short oS a miracle."' It closes, over five hundred pagcs later, with an aclcnowledgiment that he sometimes fcels "overwhelmed by a sense of [his] success and ease." (525) Levinsky tells his story after his struggles are over, when he is middle-aged, has everything money can buy, and finally has leisure to analyze and ponder his condition in depth. Cahan's narrative thus givcs the reader access to two versions of his protagonist in the historical and social context of the late 1890s and early 1900s: Levinsky the characterthe relatively innocent greenhorn striving to bccome an American, and Levinsky the narratorthc more insightful and maturc pcrsona who has made it and now reconstructs his lire in the I Abraham Cahan, Tlze Rise o/'L)nvid Levi7z.skcji (New York: Penguin, 1993), 3. All subsequent rcfcrcnccs to the novel come from this edition and will be given in pa-u-enthesis.
American Literature, Aug 16, 2017
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Papers by Magdalena Zaborowska