The Houghton Library at Harvard University has acquired a typed script of an unfinished James Baldwin play “The Welcome Table.” The manuscript is the 3,000 item acquired by the library archives since 1874.
One of the main characters in the Baldwin play, Peter Davis, is based on Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard. Another character is based on Josephine Baker. In 1973, Professor Gates, who was working as a London-based journalist at the time, drove Josephine Baker to Baldwin’s villa in France, where the three dined together.
There are four known versions of the script that were written over the years. In one version, Professor Gates is a young man but in a later version he is a middle-aged man. Gates owns one of the other copies of the unfinished play. Another is held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. The fourth is owned by a private collector.
article via jbhe.com
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[…] The Baldwin kaleidoscope of shattered barriers reflected throughout the weekend. On the Thursday-night opening plenary panel on the state of “Baldwin studies,” Magdalena J. Zaborowska, a full professor in the department of American culture at the University of Michigan, reminded the audience that Baldwin is an “ancestor of sexual minorities.” He broke the binaries of black and white, straight and LGBTQ, she said. His life and work, she summarized, was one of resistance to categorization. During the panel discussion Friday of Baldwin’s work as a playwright and journalist, Pekka Kilpeläinen, an academy research fellow of the University of Eastern Finland’s department of English language and culture, talked about how Baldwin’s worldview transcended America and its narrow cultural ideals in his last (and unfinished) play, The Welcome Table. […]
[…] The Baldwin kaleidoscope of shattered barriers reflected throughout the weekend. On the Thursday-night opening plenary panel on the state of “Baldwin studies,” Magdalena J. Zaborowska, a full professor in the department of American culture at the University of Michigan, reminded the audience that Baldwin is an “ancestor of sexual minorities.” He broke the binaries of black and white, straight and LGBTQ, she said. His life and work, she summarized, was one of resistance to categorization. During the panel discussion Friday of Baldwin’s work as a playwright and journalist, Pekka Kilpeläinen, an academy research fellow of the University of Eastern Finland’s department of English language and culture, talked about how Baldwin’s worldview transcended America and its narrow cultural ideals in his last (and unfinished) play, The Welcome Table. […]