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One of the foremost Black writers and intellectuals of his era, Claude McKay (1889¿1948) was a central figure in Caribbean literature, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black radical tradition. Winston James offers a revelatory account of McKay¿s political and intellectual trajectory from his upbringing in Jamaica through 1921.
Sommario
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Part I: Jamaican Beginnings: The Formation of a Black Fabian, 1889–1912
1. A Son of the Soil: Jamaica’s Claude McKay
2. Holding the Negro in Subjection: Claude McKay’s Jamaica
3. You Caan’ Mek We Shet Up: McKay’s Jamaican Poetry of Rebellion
4. The Man Who Left Jamaica: Claude McKay in 1912
Part II: Coming to America: From Fabianism to Bolshevism, 1912–1919
5. “Six Silent Years”: McKay and America, 1912–1918
6. Fighting Back: Claude McKay and the Crisis of 1919
Part III: England, Their England: McKay’s British Sojourn, 1919–1921
7. English Innings and Left-Wing Communism: McKay’s Bolshevization in Britain
8. Making Spring in New Hampshire, the 1917 Club, Standing Up, and Thinking of England
A Coda
Notes
Index
Info autore
Winston James is the author of A Fierce Hatred of Injustice: Claude McKay’s Jamaica and His Poetry of Rebellion (2000); The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm: The Life and Writings of a Pan-Africanist Pioneer, 1799–1851 (2010); and Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (second edition, 2020), winner of the Gordon K. Lewis Memorial Award for Caribbean Scholarship of the Caribbean Studies Association. He is also coeditor of and contributor to Inside Babylon: The Caribbean Diaspora in Britain (1993). James has held teaching positions in the United Kingdom and the United States, most recently as professor of history at the University of California, Irvine.
Riassunto
Finalist, Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History, African American Intellectual History Society
Shortlisted, 2023 Historical Nonfiction Legacy Award, Hurston / Wright Foundation
One of the foremost Black writers and intellectuals of his era, Claude McKay (1889–1948) was a central figure in Caribbean literature, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black radical tradition. McKay’s life and writing were defined by his class consciousness and anticolonialism, shaped by his experiences growing up in colonial Jamaica as well as his early career as a writer in Harlem and then London. Dedicated to confronting both racism and capitalist exploitation, he was a critical observer of the Black condition throughout the African diaspora and became a committed Bolshevik.
Winston James offers a revelatory account of McKay’s political and intellectual trajectory from his upbringing in Jamaica through the early years of his literary career and radical activism. In 1912, McKay left Jamaica to study in the United States, never to return. James follows McKay’s time at the Tuskegee Institute and Kansas State University, as he discovered the harshness of American racism, and his move to Harlem, where he encountered the ferment of Black cultural and political movements and figures such as Hubert Harrison and Marcus Garvey. McKay left New York for London, where his commitment to revolutionary socialism deepened, culminating in his transformation from Fabian socialist to Bolshevik.
Drawing on a wide variety of sources, James offers a rich and detailed chronicle of McKay’s life, political evolution, and the historical, political, and intellectual contexts that shaped him.
Testo aggiuntivo
James is well-known for his ability to historicize McKay while retaining a keen sensitivity to, and reading of, McKay’s literary contributions. In this book, he emphasizes an often-inadequately addressed aspect of the writer’s work: a deep understanding of McKay’s early political formation and radicalization, and how such origins structured McKay’s thinking and art.
