Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance
Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance
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Abstract
“Sasha” was the code name adopted by Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay (1889–1948) to foil investigations of his life and work. Over a period of two decades, the FBI, U.S. State Department, British police and intelligence, and French law enforcement and colonial authorities took turns harassing McKay, an openly gay, Marxist, Jamaican expatriate who had left the United States and was living in Europe. This study of four of McKay's texts—a literary, cultural, and historical analysis to address the multilayered “queer black anarchism” in McKay's writings—argues that McKay's “fringe” perspective not only targeted him for investigation but also contributed to a declining literary reputation. Perceived as mystifying and unacceptable because of his dedication to communism, McKay is perplexing and difficult to classify within the traditional constructs of the Harlem Renaissance. This book analyzes three of the most important works in McKay's career—the Jazz Age bestseller Home to Harlem, the négritude manifesto Banjo, and the unpublished Romance in Marseille. The book uncovers ways in which Home to Harlem assembles a home-front queer black anarchism, and treats Banjo as a novel that portrays Marxist internationalist sexual dissidence. It assesses the consequence of McKay's landmark Romance in Marseille, a text that is, despite its absence from broad public access for nearly 80 years, conceivably the most significant early black Diaspora text. Finally, it examines McKay's extensive FBI file and his late-1930s autobiography,A Long Way from Home, in which McKay disguises his past as a means of eluding his harassers.
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Front Matter
- Introduction: Manifesting Claude Mckay
- 1 Code Name Sasha, “My Real Name”
- 2 The “Distilled Poetry” of Queer Black Marxism in A Long Way From Home
- 3 “Dark Desire All Over the Pages”: Race, Nation, and Sex in Home to Harlem
- 4 The “Rude Anarchy” of “Black Boys” in Banjo
- 5 “Swaying to the Music of the Moon”: Black-White Queer Solidarity in Romance in Marseille
- Conclusion: Some Remarks on the Critical Implications of Queer Black Marxism
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End Matter
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