On 2 August 2024, James Baldwin would have turned 100 years old. Few writers influenced society across generations as profoundly as he did. The festival What Would James Baldwin Do? celebrates the novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and human rights activist. Across three days, the festival—held at the Literary Colloquium Berlin (6 & 7 September) and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (8 September)—explores the many facets of Baldwin’s work: his prose, which made him a global star; his remarkable yet lesser-known lyrical texts; his plays and his life in Turkey; the films in which he appeared; and the music that inspired him. Last but not least, there is dancing and a toast to his birthday. Through readings, panel discussions, and theater performances, the festival invites us to view our present through the lens of the great poet and thinker.

Find the complete festival programme at whatwouldjimmydo.de 

Programme

15:00
Conversation
Overcoming the Present: Max Czollek in Conversation with René Aguigah
in German with simultaneous translation into English, and German Sign Language (DGS) 
ticket required

As part of the HKW conversation series Overcoming the Present, Max Czollek talks to cultural journalist and author René Aguigah about his recently published book James Baldwin: Der Zeuge. Ein Portrait. Aguigah’s essayistic book sets out in search of what Baldwin, one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, contributed to the act of overcoming our present. At the core are questions about the relationship between being an artist and activism, the tension between literature and politics, and the mediation between advocacy for minorities and a universalist horizon of action. Baldwin, who knew hatred so well, held on to love in his novels and essays. Aguigah portrays him as a witness to a time of violence and injustice that still exists today; as well as a hope that things will get better, whose story expands into the present.

17:00
Video Lecture
Magdalena J. Zaborowska: James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade
in English with simultaneous German translation

This brief lecture explores how Baldwin’s residences in Turkey throughout the 1960s helped him to reshape his views on sociability and national identity as much as on race and sexuality, and hence significantly influenced his articulations of Americanness across the Atlantic. Zaborowska argues that Baldwin’s Turkish decade and his relationships with Turkish artists and intellectuals added an important chapter to the emerging field of transnational African American studies. By putting in dialogue Baldwin’s articulations of the erotic and exile, and by locating that dialogue between Turkey and the United States, she shows how his revolutionary works exploded limiting notions of racialized authorship, place, and national identity.

17:15
Lecture Performance
‘Because you don’t understand that you, for me, are my prisoner’
Director: Gürsoy Doğtaş, performers: Ahmet Sitki Demir, Deniz Karslıoğlu, Mesut Özdemir, and Adir Jan
in German and Turkish, with German and English surtitles

On 23 December 1969, James Baldwin staged the play Fortune and Men’s Eyes (Turkish title: Düşenin Dostu) by Canadian playwright John Herbert for the Gülriz Sururi-Engin Cezzar Theater in Istanbul. The entire plot of Düşenin Dostu is set in a prison cell in a juvenile detention center. His directorial debut celebrated a remarkable success in Istanbul and subsequently went on a nationwide tour. The play also won over audiences in part due to Baldwin’s own prison experiences. Having spent time in prison himself, some of the protagonists in his novels are prisoners and he repeatedly campaigned for the release of inmates, both in the US and in Turkey. The lecture performance by Gürsoy Doğtaş brings together scenes of this engagement.

18:30
Prologue to the film screening
Oliver Hardt: On Camera—James Baldwin and the Cinema
in German with simultaneous English translation

‘The language of the camera is the language of our dreams’, writes Baldwin in his 1976 memoir The Devil Finds Work. Baldwin had been interested in cinema since his childhood. He knew about the seductive power of images and stories, both good and bad. And he put this knowledge to good use: in his sharp analyses of Hollywood cinema and as a striking actor in front of the camera in numerous documentaries and television appearances.

Film Screening
I Heard it through the Grapevine
Dick Fontaine, 1982, US, 91'
with James Baldwin, David Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Chinua Achebe
Documentary Form | Restoration by the Harvard Film Archive
English with subtitles

Two decades after the Civil Rights Movement, James Baldwin revisits historical places stretching from the South to the North—from Selma and Birmingham, Alabama to Atlanta, Georgia and on to the battleground beaches of St. Augustine, Florida and the Dr Martin Luther King Memorial in Washington DC. On this journey down memory lane, he engages in conversations with friends, activists, and fellow writers such as Amiri Baraka, Oretha Castle Haley, and Chinua Achebe, reflecting on the past events that sparked the fight against racial segregation, the attacks on churches, racist police brutality, and the arbitrary injustices which the Black population had to endure. Questioning their own legacy, these luminaries look at the present and how little has actually been achieved in the wake of the movement, and we, the audience, are equally encouraged to reflect on our own era. Dick Fontaine skilfully weaves archival materials into the accounts, making his film at once a poignant historical document and highly relevant today in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement.