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Claude McKay ended his days hating England and the civilisation it represented. McKay journeyed from New York after an absence of more than seven years from his native Jamaica. He was the first Caribbean intellectual to describe what it meant to be black in Britain. His membership of the Workers' Socialist Federation (WSF) provided McKay with important insights into the politics of the metropolis. The International Socialist Club (ISC) had a two-fold impact upon McKay, one political, the other intellectual. In addition to the ISC and the 1917, McKay for a short time frequented a small club on Drury Lane specially established for non-white colonial and Afro-American soldiers. McKay described his time in London as ‘that most miserable of years’; an ‘ordeal’. His disappointment stems from his experience and from his expectations. He never complained of loneliness; he complained of hostility.

This chapter follows the rise of a racial catholicity; a formation that reflected the convergence of a shift toward the universal in black writing and the marked expansion of an African American presence within the Roman Catholic Church. Attention is given, first, to two cases—one literary and one biographical—that help to capture these respective developments: the publication of The Negro Caravan, and the personal spiritual journey of Claude McKay that culminated with his Catholic conversion in 1944. Next, a close and comparative reading is given to two key texts of the moment—McKay’s Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940) and Roi Ottley’s New World A-Coming (1943)—to reveal the tensions between the racial difference associated with Catholicism and black claims of catholicity, which ultimately remained connected to a dominant Protestantism in American life even as a novel Judeo-Christian sensibility emerged.

Amongst studies concerning the Harlem Renaissance authors, Festus Claudius McKay is at last in vogue. Even at the prime of his career, McKay was often a marginalized figure. This book examines “Sasha”, a code name adopted by Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay to thwart investigations on his life and work. For more than two decades, the FBI, U.S. State Department, British police and intelligence, and French law and colonial authorities took turns harassing McKay who was openly gay, a Marxist, and a Jamaican emigrant who had left the U.S. and settled in Europe. This book evaluates four of McKay's works to address the multilayered black queer anarchism present in McKay's literature. This queer black anarchism present in McKay's writings made him subject of investigations and contributed to his declining literary reputation. Often perceived as unacceptable and mystifying due to his dedication to communism, McKay is often taken to be perplexing hence making him and his work difficult to classify within the traditional constructs of Harlem Renaissance. This book examines McKay's most important works: the Jazz Age bestseller Home to Harlem, the négritude novelBanjo, and the unpublished Romance in Marseille. In this book, the queer black anarchism of the Home to Harlem, the Marxist international sexual dissidence portrayed by the Banjo , and the consequences of the Romance in Marseille which is the most significant early black diaspora novel are examined and assessed. The book also includes an examination of McKay's FBI files and his autobiography A Long Way from Home which served as means for McKay to disguise his past in order to escape his harassers.

This chapter studies two notable missionary novels, Alice Tisdale Hobart's 1936 Yang and Yin and Claude McKay's Banana Bottom. The first novel is considered to be the best fictional account of an American Protestant medical missionary placed in China during the first quarter of the twentieth century. The other novel is a result of its author's experience with Baptist missionaries prevalent in the British colony of Jamaica. Both the novels engage the subject of Western imperialism. The main point of view of Yang and Yin is the rigid theology of the Christian mission, which is highly misdirected and counterproductive. On the other hand, Banana Bottom treats missionary evangelicalism with respect to post-colonial slavery legacy in the Americas.

This chapter examines Claude McKay's autobiographical novel A Long Way Home which in certain respects comes only second to his FBI files in respect to a dependable account of his time in Europe and North Africa. The purpose of this chapter is to assess whether McKay's Along Way from Home can be treated as a complete and reliable source of McKay's queer black Marxism. This chapter looks closely into the text's passionate denunciation of Communism and the resultant generally complacent view of the memoir, prefiguring the Communist repudiations of writers like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, to serve as the archetypal African American refutation of international leftism. For over a half century, critics have seen A Long Way Home as not a truly committed Marxist work, wherein he is deemed to have long suspended his association with subversives. This chapter looks into the core of McKay's memoir and seeks to pinpoint the perceived residue of his queer black Marxism which is manifested by the survival of McKay's “real name” Sasha.

The third chapter brings together Caribbean-born migrant writers Claude McKay and George Lamming, and forms a bridge across the divides of period and national literature that usually assign McKay to the Harlem Renaissance and Lamming either to the category of postwar black British literature or Caribbean literature. In allowing these two writers to converge, I argue that a paranational account of modernist internationalism emerges in their mutual formal and theoretical engagement with plotlessness. A lack of a plot, understood in the polysemic terms of a planned-out heteronormative life, a collective political program, and a patch of land to call home, becomes the common ground from which McKay’s Banjo: A Story without a Plot (1929) and Lamming’s The Emigrants (1954) explore the fugitive life and fantasies of colonial black subjects within a securitized Europe. In deforming plot and finding an alternative idiom, rhythm, and structure for the mobility of stigmatized populations, McKay and Lamming’s novels anticipate contemporary theories of cosmopolitics and international law (namely, those of Etienne Balibar, Seyla Benhabib, and Nicolae Gheorghe), which have argued for the accommodation of transience within territorialized models of belonging and citizenship.

This chapter considers Claude McKay’s novels Home to Harlem and Banjo as attempts to undertake literary primitivism’s project of immediacy by means of a musical aesthetics. Exploring his relationship both to the negritude poets and to Lawrence, especially the latter’s Aaron’s Rod, it argues that of all the writers discussed in this book, McKay’s work most strenuously attempts to enter the immediate mode. In McKay’s novels the hope for a reconciliation of reflexivity and immediacy, the primitive and the civilized is enacted simultaneously at the level of prose style and narrative structure. This allows us to identify a number of fissures and contradictions that beset the aesthetics of primitivism, especially the pitfalls of a utopian racialism.

This chapter claims that the autobiographies of two African American writers—Claude McKay and Langston Hughes—document the transnational range of geopolitical activism, which used cultural expression to mobilize people for political causes and to engage political representatives at the highest levels of government and public policymaking. Both McKay's A Long Way from Home and Hughes' I Wonder as I Wander show that the authors participated in the Communist or left-wing, “radical” parties while writing and thinking about literature as an informal strategy to influence societies at home and abroad. As such, McKay and Hughes were as much agents of political and class reform as they were literary travelers; they employed what “the perspective of a traveling black subject” to achieve a geopolitical and transnational form of African American literature.

The author points out the phrase that Claude McKay used to describe one of the characters in his novel, as this may also be used to describe a number of other characters and even the author himself — “Nationality doubtful… with no place to go.” For blacks and other nonwhites, nationality is not only doubtful but also impossible, as this at times may also be a desirable and appealing attribute. This chapter investigates the trends, causes, and possible outcomes and consequences of the creative works of black artists that go beyond national boundaries, and the types of politics brought about by situations of no permanent settlement. Also, the chapter points out how some nonwhite endeavours may entail decentralization.

This essay examines the persuasive fit between the biographical evidence of Claude McKay’s life, his characterization of Bita Plant as a maroon figure returning to “the point of entanglement” (Glissant, Caribbean Discourse 26), and the continuum of masculine subjectivity in McKay’s work, from Jake/ Ray to Banjo/Ray to Bita. The author posits the idea of Bita as McKay’s maroon self returned in drag on two bases: one, that the life of a vagabond troubadour, and the habit of literary self-portrait had so become second nature to McKay, that he was unable to inhabit a less ambiguous, less tricksterish persona; two, that McKay’s unresolved issues with his mother and father play out as impersonation or ventriloquism, reconciliation, exorcism, and homage in the figure of Bita. The essay argues also that McKay’s lifelong and haunting need to return to the country of his birth played out in this literary disguise in which, if we also see Bita as Jamaica developing a decolonized subjectivity, her move is from (feminized) colonial territory to an authoritative republic of the self.

Chapter Two examines Nancy Cunard's massive Negro anthology (1934) and her dealings with three important collaborators: Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay. Using archival sources, this chapter asks why the bigoted Pound would contribute to Cunard's project of racial reconciliation - and strike up an unlikely correspondence with Langston Hughes in the process - and also why Claude McKay, who was in political sympathy with Cunard, would angrily withdraw his contribution. It argues that modernist networks, with their complex systems of obligation and reciprocation - and not political affiliations or racial identities - should be used to explain the production history and meaning of Cunard's volume.

This chapter concludes the study by examining exchanges between African American and Afro-Caribbean contexts, as expressed in Harlem Renaissance texts. Jacques Rancière’s concepts of engaged spectatorship and subject emancipation are used to analyze intra-African Diasporic exchanges in postcolonial contexts. The chapter focuses on works by writers of the Harlem Renaissance with specific attention to their apprehension of Haitian history and folklore as an expression of autochthonomous realities. The chapter argues that what made it possible for Harlem Renaissance writers to identify with cultures and aesthetics produced by other writers and cultures of the African Diaspora was the movement’s professed search and advocacy for an African American sensibility that would birth a “New Negro” not defined by the state, or by a history of subjugation. Works by Zora Neale Hurston and Claude McKay show an impulse that was not one of domination, such as we see reflected in traditional travel texts, but one of af/filiation (as defined in previous chapters).

This chapter focuses on Claude McKay, who launched his literary career with creole poems written in the voice of Jamaican speakers that detail daily experiences and existential crises. It discusses McKay’s portrayal of the Jamaican peasantry in relation to tourist photography of the early 20th century, producing a new and powerful imperial way of representing the Caribbean called “tropicality”. McKay’s 1912 dialect poetry Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads constituted Jamaica’s first self-consciously national literature and was part of Jamaica’s emergent cultural nationalism, promoting Jamaican literature centered on the peasantry.

This chapter looks into Claude McKay's “Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem,” which was written during the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. McKay's novel hinges upon the question of what it means to be an “authentic” Ethiopian imperial representative. It focuses on one of the novel's characters, Alamaya, who admits cagily that a signed letter from the emperor establishing his bona fides “was authentic but not genuine”; later, as part of a scheme to raise funds for the Ethiopian cause, Alamaya and his secret communist colleague “invent” an Ethiopian princess by costuming a local Harlem woman. But in fact, it was Professor Koazhy, a costumed figure modeled after Marcus Garvey, and not the meek visiting Ethiopian prince Alamaya, who proves to be the “authentic” Ethiopian prince. The chapter also explains how the existence of a centralized Ethiopian empire would challenge the viability of an imagined extra-imperial network of black internationalism.

This chapter offers a reading of Claude McKay’s 1928 novel Home to Harlem, focusing on the predominately masculine lens through which he explores the variety and scope of black urban diasporic life—its global and multiregional perspectives. It considers Home to Harlem as a literary depiction of the reality of an expansive African diaspora in the early twentieth century. In depicting black life and notions of community in 1920s black America, McKay examines the wonder, excitement, and limits of Harlem through recognition of alternative locations where black community thrived. His complicated and primarily masculinist presentation of modern industrial life utilizes proletarian characters that highlight the divergent diasporic routes of the New Negro reality and the Harlem Renaissance.

This chapter assesses the imperial origins of immigration. Chapter 6 studies Nadifa Mohamed’s 2010 novel Black Mamba Boy as a refashioning of Claude McKay’s novel Banjo. The chapter reads Mohamed’s novel as a migritude text and demonstrates the ways in which it reshapes Banjo’s migrant pan-Africanism into a narrative that negotiates colonial structures from the perspective of Somali migration. Jama’s diasporic nomadism, for example, circulates through, and is impinged upon by, both British and Italian colonial institutions and modes of managing movement. Furthermore, he is literally conscripted by the Italian army—a fate not uncommon for Somalis. Beyond the colonial setting of Black Mamba Boy, Mohamed, also speaks to our twenty-first century and the ways in which immigrants from the Global South are haunted, even conscripted, by colonial structures of immigration in the present.

This chapter examines the impact of World War I on soldiers of African descent and their place, as both symbols and historical actors, in the New Negro movement. It considers how black soldiers from throughout the African diaspora helped shape the radical consciousness of Claude McKay, one of the leading figures in a globally expanding New Negro movement, during the war. McKay, a Jamaica native who left for the United States in 1912, was a budding poet who burst onto the literary and political scene with the July 1919 appearance of “If We Must Die,” written in the midst of the summer’s torrent of racial violence. “If We Must Die” served as a rallying cry for a postwar generation of African Americans and other peoples of African descent committed to challenging racial injustice. McKay traveled to London in fall 1919 and was introduced to a local club for black soldiers. If the war acted as the engine of mobilization setting the African diaspora into motion, black soldiers made the process of the diaspora alive with radical possibility.

This chapter examines Claude McKay's Romance in Marseille which is the crucial third novel of McKay's queer black Marxist trilogy. Romance in Marseille is a candid intercourse of queer black and white proletariat which unifies the projects of the three black queer revolutionary novels of McKay. This novel is a work that articulates dramatic intelligence about the character of radical fiction during the late 1920s and the early 1930s. This unpublished novel presents a gay white radical character who imparts to black workingmen and Communists of different races the emancipator power of queer anarchist possibility. This chapter discusses the significance of the sexual underworld in McKay's novel, with particular focus on the black anarchist queer nationhood that can be traced in the text wherein the socially unacceptable may pursue their passion and pleasure at the crossroads of queer brotherhood and leftist cultural work. Romance in Marseille reflects Eduoard Glissant's revision of négritude. The novel' creolization presents a voice of the postcolonial phenomenological condition of becoming a race and an emergence beyond race to culture built on the potential for revolutionary merging.