Reading James Baldwin in 2025: A Conversation with Gary Younge

As part of this year’s Common Read, we will be gathering in room C102 on October 22 from 5:30pm to think about, talk about and celebrate the work of African-American writer James Baldwin.

In particular we will be wondering what it means to read James Baldwin’s work in 2025. How can his work help us imagine our own relationship to the world around us, to think through our lives in Paris, to respond to events ongoing around the world?

Students and all members of the AUP Community are invited to come and listen, but also to participate if you wish. These responses may be in response to Baldwin’s essays – perhaps those collected in the book Encounter on the Seine, his fiction, his media interventions or his activism. They may be in response to Black History month, which runs through October in Europe.

We are delighted that Professors Russell Williams and Andrea Rosengarten will be joined too by writer, broadcaster and scholar Gary Younge. Gary is a keen reader of Baldwin and the author of books including Pigeonholed: Creative Freedom as an Act of Resistance (2025) and Another Day in the Death of America (2016). He was formerly editor-at-large at The Guardian newspaper.

If you’d like to listen, you’re very welcome. If you’d like to read some of your words, or those of Baldwin that particularly speak to you, you are equally welcome – if you’d like to participate (speaking for no more than 4-5 minutes) please register your interest by emailing me at rwilliamsaup.edu.