Dagmawi Woubshet - English, University of Pennsylvania

"Last Work, Late Style: Reflections on James Baldwin’s 'The Welcome Table'" 

The story of James Baldwin the playwright, indeed James Baldwin the literary artist, begins at nine or ten as a tween author of a dramatic work and a young boy whose personal inclination and fits of passion were allied to the theater. How fitting that the last major piece of writing the author completed just months before his death, The Welcome Table, is also a work of dramatic literature. From circa 1934, when his first play was performed, to 1987, when he finished his last monograph, theater, although we seldom narrate the arc of Baldwin’s vocation in this way, is a binding thread. Indeed, if we look closely at his published and unpublished body of work, from his first public creative undertaking to his last, it becomes clear that for Baldwin drama was an abiding artistic form, the theater an essential life-force. In the first half of the lecture, then, I will focus on James Baldwin the playwright and in the second half on The Welcome Table. Baldwin’s last work is set in “an ancient rambling stone house, in the south of France,” one identical to his own home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. And it is titled after the bamboo-shaded farmhouse table in his garden—a space of gathering, fellowship, and nourishment that he christened “The Welcome Table”—the name he chose to give his last major work perhaps as a metonym for the house that houses the play, a metaphor for the gathering ground that is the theater, a gesture of gratitude to the house that received and rescued him and enabled his late career. At the center of The Welcome Table is Edith Heming, “actress-singer/star.” Her Provençal home is a much sought-after destination—as reflected by the cast of characters—for artists and revolutionaries, journalists and itinerants, family, friends and lovers who come to commune with this celebrated figure, or to attend her legendary parties, or to find some measure of peace. Building over the course of a single day and culminating in a festive birthday party, The Welcome Table foregrounds Edith’s interior (intimate, personal and communal) world, while exploring themes of gender, race, sexuality, desire, nationality, age, fame, and exile with new theatrical forms and a style characteristic of the author’s late works.

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 Black and LGBTQIA+ studies. He is the author of The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS; and co-editor of Ethiopia: Modern Nation, Ancient Roots and Ethiopia: Literature, Art, Culture. His essays have appeared in Callaloo, Transition, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, and The Atlantic. He is currently completing Noways Tired: James Baldwin and the Art of Late Style and New Flower: Lyric Essays. Woubshet is the recipient of fellowships from Civitella Ranieri (Italy), the Africa Institute in Sharjah (UAE), and the Modern Art Museum in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), where he curated Julie Mehretu: The Addis Show.

IRW Distinguished Lecture Series 2026-2027 | Dissident Aesthetics and the Remaking of Life