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Crosstown Jakes in 1920s Manhattan: Racial Formations in John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer and Claude Mckay’s Home to Harlem
- MFS Modern Fiction Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 54, Number 4, Winter 2008
- pp. 715-743
- 10.1353/mfs.0.1573
- Article
- Additional Information
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Extending Toni Morrison's argument that close scrutiny of how American Africanism works in the literary imagination is central to understanding American literature, I compare different but mutually informative racial formations in two novels of the 1920s, one by a white and the other by a black writer. I argue that their overlapping deployments of the onomastic tropes of “Jake” and “Congo” reveal what race means to Dos Passos and McKay as both narrative strategy and cultural experience.