In 2024 James Baldwin would have turned 100. It is also twenty years since the BBC first broadcast the radio play Caryl Phillips wrote about Baldwin. The Vrije Universiteit Brussel obtained permission from Phillips to broadcast this radio play once, and that will happen tonight at Passa Porta. The listening session will be followed by a panel discussion with Bénédicte Ledent (VUB), dramaturge Tunde Adefioye and audio-maker Lander Kesteloot, moderated by Tola Ositelu (VUB).

James Baldwin copyright TedThai

A Kind of Home

The radio play A Kind of Home by British author Caryl Phillips was first broadcast by the BBC in 2004. James Baldwin would have turned 80 that year had he not died in 1987 in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in southern France, where Phillips first met him in 1983.

James Baldwin in Paris

A Kind of Home covers the period when the young writer first moved to Paris and the difficult circumstances in which he wrote and published his first novel Go Tell It On the Mountain. In short scenes, companions, well-wishers, antagonists and allies of the young and searching Baldwin make their appearance. Paris has a rich history of foreigners trying to escape from their native soil where they cannot feel at home, and the city has a great presence. But not everything goes according to plan in Baldwin's Paris. Here, too, the hatred of white supremacist culture from segregated America casts a shadow. It impacts the emotional landscape and creates conflict.

Caryl Phillips

Caryl Phillips is a multi-award-winning writer of novels, essays and plays. His work has been translated into several languages. Nine of his radio radio plays have been broadcast by the BBC. He was born on the Caribbean island of St Kitts, grew up in northern England and currently lives in the US, where he is a professor of English at Yale University.

100 years

A century after the birth of James Baldwin and 20 years after the first broadcast of the radio play, we get to perform A Kind of Home in Brussels. Bénédicte Ledent, 2024 Lorand Chair of Intermediality at the Free University of Brussels, honorary professor at the Université de Liège, author of several works on the literature of the Caribbean and its diaspora, and contributor of Radio Plays by Caryl Phillips (Methuen, 2023).

This will be followed by a panel discussion on audio drama with Bénédicte Ledent, Lander Kesteloot (creator of the literary podcast ‘De Letterfretters’ and Tunde Adefioye, dramaturg and lecturer at Sint Lucas Antwerp, moderated by Tola Ositelu, researcher at the VUB.