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In this chapter, Magdalena J. Zaborowska sketches out how Beauford Delaney’s spiritual and artistic fatherhood of James Baldwin helped the writer achieve a complex and unique literary aesthetic, inflected by Delaney’s idiosyncratic paintings and honed over decades of a complex familial relationship that included residencies in France and Turkey. Young Baldwin seemed caught between two irreconcilable father figures: a Black heteropatriarchal religious father who despised him and a Black queer bohemian father who loved and nurtured him. Rather than seeing Baldwin as torn between chronologically distant father figures presiding over discreet phases of his authorial life, however, the chapter asks us to understand their presence as a persistent, achronological circulation throughout Baldwin’s literary works—intertwined, omnipresent, and in constant tension within the universe of his literary imagination.

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