James Baldwin’s American Scene

The screening of James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket was followed by a discussion between the film’s writer, coproducer, and director Karen Thorsen and Professor Jacqueline Goldsby. As a filmmaker, Thorsen finds her inspiration and themes at the intersection of art and social justice. She tells stories about “game changers,” as she puts it, “artists and activists who shape history.” Price of the Ticket, her first feature-length documentary, was a worldwide hit. After its PBS debut in 1990, the film was screened and honored in such major venues as the Sundance, London, Berlin, and Tokyo Film Festivals. Recently, Thorsen launched a major fundraising campaign to restore and digitize the film. With that success, she now leads “The James Baldwin Project,” an initiative to establish school curriculum based on Baldwin’s writings in precollege classrooms across the United States. Jacqueline Goldsby is Professor of English and African American Studies at Yale University.

Franke Lectures in the Humanities, "James Baldwin's American Scene" Christopher Lebron is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of The Color of Our Shame: Race and Justice in Our Time, winner of the American Political Science Association Foundations of Political Theory First Book Award, as well as numerous academic articles and book reviews on race and political ethics. Lebron has also written for the New York Times’s The Stone column and Boston Review. He has just completed “The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea,” forthcoming in 2017. He was recently named a finalist for the Hiett Prize, awarded by the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, which recognizes promising young scholars and writers who are influencing public debates through their work.

Magda Zaborowska is a professor in the Departments of American Culture and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. Her research and teaching fields include literary and cultural studies approaches to intersections of social space and transatlantic discourses on race, nationality, sexuality, and gender; African American literature; immigrant ethnicities, feminist, and critical race theory; and post-totalitarian East-Central Europe. She has taught and been a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Oregon, Furman University, Tulane University, Aarhus University in Denmark, University of Italy in Cagliari (Sardinia), and Université Paul-Valéry in Montpellier in France. Among her published works are the MLA award-winning James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile; How We Found America: Reading Gender through East European Immigrant Narratives; and the edited and coedited collections Other Americans, Other Americas: The Politics and Poeti

Rich Blint is the 2016–2017 Scholar-in-Residence in the MFA Program in Performance and Performance Studies in the Department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute. His teaching and research interests include American, African American, and Anglophone Caribbean literature and culture; the life and work of James Baldwin; racial visuality and US popular culture; post-colonialism and diaspora; as well as urban form and politics in the context of the global. He is coeditor of a special issue of African American Review on James Baldwin (Winter 2013); contributing editor of The James Baldwin Review; guest critic of the October 2016 issue of the Brooklyn Rail, which focuses on James Baldwin; and is completing the introduction for an e-book of selections from Baldwin’s first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son, and poems from Jimmy’s Blues. He is presently at work on his book project, “Trembling on the Edge of Confession: James Baldwin and National Innocence in Modern Ameri

Ed Pavlić is Distinguished Research Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia and director of the PhD program in creative writing. He is the author of Let’s Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno; “Who Can Afford to Improvise?”: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric, and the Listeners; Visiting Hours at the Color Line; But Here Are Small Clear Refractions; Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway; Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue; Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture; and Labors Lost Left Unfinished. “Live at the Bitter End: A Trial by Opera” and “Another Kind of Madness: A Novel in 88 Improvisations” are forthcoming. Pavlić has won the Albert Christ-Janer Creative Research Award, the National Poetry Series Open Competition, the American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Prize, the Writer of the Year Award from the Georgia Writer’s Association, and the Darwin Turner Memorial Award from African