The Red Is East: Claude McKay and the New Black Radicalism of the Twentieth Century

Extract

Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance, Gary Edward Holcomb. University Press of Florida, 2007.

The Shadowed Country: Claude McKay and the Romance of the Victorians, Josh Gosciak. Rutgers University Press, 2006.

Black radicalism in the twentieth century was marked by a new emphasis on ideological, intellectual, artistic, and spiritual spaces and circuits outside of what we might normally think of as the “Atlantic World” or the “Black Atlantic.” The expansion and consolidation of European and North American colonies in Asia and across the entire continent of Africa by the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as the rise of various strains of socialist internationalism, caused black radicals to increasingly look beyond as well as across the Atlantic Rim, tracing out new anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and often anti-capitalist connections and revisiting older Afro-Asian links. The rising tide of color, class, and national consciousness in the post-Bolshevik Revolution era encouraged radicals (and reactionaries) of various stripes to make these connections as seen in James Vanderzee's famous picture of a 1924 parade in Harlem by Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association where marchers carry a sign reading “England Would Do Well To Let Gandhi Go.”