Humanities Forum — Dagmawi Woubshet

Dagmawi Woubshet, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Associate Professor, English, University of Pennsylvania
James Baldwin and the Art of Late Style
The annual Daphne Harrison Lecture
This event is part of the Fall 2024 Humanities Forum.

James Baldwin has come back with full force in our era of Black Lives Matter. In the 100 years since his birth, he has become the most cited literary artist—living or dead—on matters of race on social media since the Ferguson Uprising, his words deployed to expose white power and innocence and to express black rage and ethics. Decades after his death, the fact that Baldwin’s words ring loud and true today not only testifies to his genius, but also offers an indictment of an America that continues to disparage, torture, and murder black people with impunity. However, even as this revival champions Baldwin for our times, this emphasis on the author’s 1960s Civil Rights era writings eclipses the body of literary work he produced from the mid-1970s until his death in 1987. In this talk, Woubshet will focus on the author’s neglected later writings, which foreground black interior and intra-racial life, recasting a black world unencumbered by the white-black racial antagonism that drives much of Baldwin’s earlier writings. Ultimately, as he argues, the work Baldwin produced in the 1980s reaches a depth of perception that comes perhaps only with age.

Dagmawi Woubshet is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Associate Term Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. A scholar of literature and visual culture, he works at the intersections of Africana and LGBTQIA+ studies. He is the author of The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS. His essays have appeared in Callaloo, Transition, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, and The Atlantic. Woubshet is the recipient of fellowships from Civitella Ranieri, the Africa Institute in Sharjah, and the Modern Art Museum in Addis Ababa, where he curated Julie Mehretu: The Addis Show. He is currently completing a book on James Baldwin’s late style. Before joining the University of Pennsylvania in 2017, Woubshet taught at Cornell University where he was named one of “The 10 Best Professors at Cornell.” He received his Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University and his B.A. in Political Science and History from Duke University.

Admission is free.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Africana Studies and the Department of English.

Photo: Lindsay France