2015/01/01 by Eric H. Newman · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Race, History, and American Society #Music History and Culture #Latin American and Latino Studies #Harlem Renaissance #Queer #Politics #Art history #Aesthetics #Sociology #Literature #Art #Gender studies #Performance art #Law
paper · doi:10.1353/cal.2015.0017
openalex publication_date 2015/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
Ephemeral Utopias:Queer Cruising, Literary Form, and Diasporic Imagination in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem and Banjo Eric H. Newman (bio) In his oft-cited essay “The Black Man’s Burden,” Henry Louis Gates observes that the “usual roll call” of the Harlem Renaissance—a list that includes Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Alain Locke, Countee Cullen, Wallace Thurman, and Richard Bruce Nugent—offers compelling evidence that the cultural movement was “surely as gay as it was black” (233). For Gates, this provocative observation offers an opening for thinking through cultural responses to the question of identity politics from the 1920s Harlem of Langston Hughes to the 1980s London of Isaac Julien, and for interrogating the homophobia that has been a feature of black nationalist thought across the twentieth century. In pursuing this course, Gates forecloses inquiry into other meaty questions raised by his assertion, namely that homosexuality might have been as essential to the aesthetics and politics with which we associate the Harlem Renaissance as race. This essay emerges from a desire to think about how a Harlem Renaissance “as gay as it was black” reframes our understanding of the role that queer sociality and experience may have played in the movement’s formal experimentation and political vision. Taking as my object Claude McKay, one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most foundational, mercurial, and popular authors, I argue that by reading queerness as essential rather than incidental to the structure and politics of his most famous novels, we might gain new understanding of his social vision, utopian longing, and account of diaspora. Critical approaches to McKay often struggle with the ideological range of his transnational poetry and prose, as well as his passionate attachment to and vociferous detachment from various political organizations and institutions throughout his life. Biographers have treated these shifting attachments as evidence of either a paranoid suspicion of fellow black intellectuals (and the movements and groups with which they were affiliated), his yearning for broad multiracial coalitions to fight an international struggle, or as an illustration of his belief that complete or permanent alliance with any institution or person was “next to insanity” (Tillery 74; Cooper 294). McKay’s cycling attachment to and abandonment of the people and movements in which he invested his political optimism have led critics to regard his intellectual life as a series of passionate engagements that were nevertheless quickly broken when “faiths and beliefs . . . did not work in the anticipated way” (Ramesh and Rani 7). I argue that McKay’s queerness—best defined as his same-sex desire and the social practices through which it may have been channeled—informs and structures the social vision represented in his writing as well as the formal innovations that mark him as a modernist prose stylist. Though queer sexual encounters in early-twentieth-century [End Page 167] America were often clandestine affairs of fleeting duration, the sexual practices that organized such encounters were as powerful as they were ephemeral, making imaginable a community that could appear and disappear virtually anywhere and which composed itself out of a promiscuous assortment of classed and racialized bodies. McKay’s experience of early-twentieth-century queer life, from Harlem to Marseilles to Morocco and beyond, thus offers a new understanding of his shifting political vision and the loose network of diasporic male bodies emergent in his novels Home to Harlem and Banjo. Despite what appears to be a perversely logical critical gesture—queerness’s historical inability to make sense in a world organized by the regimes of normative life offers it as a useful lens through which to examine an author whose works were judged “nonsense” by contemporaries including W. E. B. Du Bois (785)—queer studies of McKay face at least two major obstacles in the archives of his life and thought. The first of these is African American literary studies’ historical tendency to resist critical discussion of the queerness of its most celebrated figures beyond scholarly outing.1 When homosexuality is discussed, it is rarely treated as significant to understanding the author’s aesthetics or politics. The second problem is the reticence of the Harlem Renaissance’s same-sex loving authors to explicitly discuss or document...