Guest Seminar with Dagmawi Woubshet
For this session, we’re very excited to be joined by a special guest speaker – Professor Dagmawi Woubshet! He is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published work on James Baldwin, and taught a module at the University centred on his work. He will be chairing our next meeting, and has selected Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood (1976) as the focus of our discussion.
A lesser-known and discussed text, Little Man Little Man is Baldwin’s only children’s book. According to his niece Aisha Karefa-Smart, Baldwin was motivated to write a book that ‘dealt with the realities of black childhood’. The story follows TJ, a four-year-old boy, as he navigates the streets of Harlem with his friends, WT and Blinky. Along the way, he encounters various characters that live in the neighbourhood. Initially met with mixed reviews and then out-of-print for roughly four decades, the book has now been republished by Duke University Press. This edition also includes an introduction by Nicholas Boggs and Jennifer DeVere Brody that helps to contextualise the story. It also retains Yoran Cazac’s original illustrations which bring Baldwin’s narrative to life.
The font is large and the book is heavily illustrated, so don’t be daunted by the amount of pages in the PDF! If you would like to attend this Zoom meeting on 15th April, please email en17jog@leeds.ac.uk for the link.
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