Magdalena J. Zaborowska

Racing transatlantic passages: James baldwin’s african “america” and immigrant studies

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.

From Baldwin's Paris to Benjamin's:

This essay reads two strange bedfellows who employ Paris as an architectural and narrative referent to re-script Western cultural identity. In Giovannis Room (1956). James Baldwin deploys a story of a ‘maids 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.