08 ISSUE VI
JUNE 2025
JUNE 2025
The Prose of Black Queer Humanism
A new biography offers compelling, nuanced portrait that both retells and recreates James Baldwin’s life with innovation and depth.
By Alex Rossen
The Polish-born academic Magdalena J. Zaborowska was teaching at a university in Denmark when, in 2000, she first became interested in the life and work of the American writer James Baldwin. She traveled to Baldwin’s home in St. Paul-de-Vence, a village in the Provence region, where he had lived from 1970 until he died in 1987. That house contained his personal library, his private letters to friends, colleagues, and family, as well as his unpublished works. The result was a book about Baldwin’s time in Turkey, titled JAMES BALDWIN’S TURKISH DECADE: EROTICS OF EXILE, published by Duke University Press in 2008. This book is recognized as the first in-depth exploration of Baldwin’s years in Turkey, before his move to France. His time in Turkey had a profound influence on his writing and identity as a Black gay intellectual. A decade later, Zaborowska would publish ME AND MY HOUSE: JAMES BALDWIN’S LAST DECADE IN FRANCE. Now comes JAMES BALDWIN: THE LIFE ALBUM, published in March 2025.
JAMES BALDWIN: THE LIFE ALBUM expands upon aspects of James Baldwin’s existence that some readers have obscured: his erotic and sexual love for men, his domestic life, and the imaginative activism that springs through the cracks of his authorship. “A silly piece of cloth, a mundane event, and a precocious boy’s imagination add up to something written and beautiful,” she writes.
James Baldwin (1924-1987) was a writer and activist whose novels, playscripts, and essays danced at the center of race, politics, sexuality, and gender. His merging of these worlds propelled him into the acclaim of being one of the first intersectional thinkers in the literary world. By “mixing a preacher’s rageful thunder with sharp irony and elegant literary, he garnered adjectives — inimitable, passionate, unforgettable —- from fans and critics alike.”
That is to say, this is the James Baldwin that the public knew — both during and after his life — but JAMES BALDWIN: THE LIFE ALBUM is an intimate biography that peels back the layers of his personal life. Zaborowska’s choice to write this book like an album — a nonlinear journey with sides and tracks instead of sections and chapters — was meant to reflect Baldwin’s love of the Blues. “Like a phonograph record from Baldwin’s own collection, this book can be experienced in sequence or sampled in sections… for example, to hear from an older Baldwin reflecting on his experiences as a young child… to the much younger Baldwin fleeing into writing to process his pain and fear.”
Zaborowska proposes “Black Queer Humanism” as an analytical framework within which to make sense of Baldwin’s politics and life choices. Somewhat oxymoronic, this framework must also acknowledge Baldwin’s disdain for identity labels: “Instead of harping on the untruth of identity labels and binaries, Baldwin explored the way they worked and why they held power over people and their imagination.”
For Zaborowska, the affirmation of kaleidoscopic identity labels could and should be redeployed as an important lens through which to reexamine our relationship with our history. Baldwin’s work in fiction and beyond was elevated by the prose of Black Queer Humanism with which he wrote. He helped us understand how systems of race-, gender-, and sex-based oppression come together and break apart; and he offered new conceptions of how Black authors were expected to write and how Black men could behave and live. For example, Zaborowka writes that Baldwin’s burdensome upbringing in Harlem, New York City, created the template for his reckoning with heteronormativity and gender roles, and his confrontation with his Christian faith: “He could not understand human limitations; he simply wanted to escape the prison that was the house of the Lord, the reverend’s home, and the neighborhood where he did not feel he belonged. The street beckoned…books, bodies, movies, and theater — and through and beyond it loomed his own path.”
Baldwin made common cause with his “sisters in art,” among whom were the Black feminist poets Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and Maya Angelou, which helped him feel valued when men, including members of the Black Power movement, asserted their masculinity by denigrating his. In response, Baldwin sought to decentralize discussions around labels or collective representations, which he viewed as “cultural pretensions of history… masks for power,” and instead focus on what it means to be human. The editor and novelist Toni Morrison spoke to this pursuit in her eulogy to James Baldwin: “Those who saw the paucity of their own imagination in the two-way mirror you held up to them attacked the mirror, tried to reduce it to fragments which they could then rank and grade, tried to dismiss the shards where your image and theirs remained — locked but ready to soar.”
Zaborowska’s accounting of Baldwin’s first decade in France is a sweeping narrative of newfound sexual freedom, genderqueer awakenings, high moral ambitions, and his occasional failures to rise to them.
Baldwin’s politics, too, were governed by an unyielding emphasis on the power of individuality — which he applied to Western politics and international interests consistently: “Never an ideologue to toe a party line, Baldwin believed that humanist ethics meant that no states or groups had the right to discriminate, no matter what competing histories of victimization they might use to plead their case.”
JAMES BALDWIN: THE LIFE ALBUM is an innovative and imaginative take on what a biography can be. Zaborowska’s homage to the life of the legendary novelist and thought leader is a compelling narrative of Baldwin’s nuances and complexities. It not only retells them, but recreates them.
Alex Rossen holds an MA in International Affairs from The New School.