Signifyin(g) Afro-Orientalism: The Jazz-Addict Subculture in Nigger Heaven and Home to Harlem

“Why do you spend all your time in Harlem with dopeaddicts and bootleggers?”

—Carl Van Vechten¹

“New York . . . . That’s not a place. That’s a dream.”

—Ralph Ellison²

Notoriously linked and frequently besmirched as racist or exploitative of black cultural stereotypes, Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven (1926) and Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) juxtapose Harlem’s emergent black middle class, seeking education and cultural refinement, with the decadence and debauchery of cabarets, speakeasies, gambling, pimping, interracial sexuality, homosexuality, and myriad intoxications. Dismissing these representations of Harlem’s sordid underbelly as mere sensationalism, reckless bookselling fodder, or even racial betrayal, as a range of notable critics once did, at once obfuscates black and African-American socio-economic hierarchies and elides the complex cultural exchanges made possible by Harlem’s thriving Prohibition-era culture.³ Through meticulous descriptions of cabarets, speakeasies, and urban pleasure-seekers, Van Vechten and McKay illuminate a nascent subculture of jazz and intoxication that is not antithetical, but integral, to the history of Harlem’s New Negro community. Hedonistic or not, the sites and activities associated with Harlem’s nightlife enabled substantial and dynamic cultural exchanges that far exceed primitivist fantasies and trendy exoticism.

Even if Nigger Heaven and Home to Harlem “were not designed to elucidate a complex human existence,” as Houston A. Baker, Jr. once proclaimed, they nonetheless record how what I call the jazz-addict subculture interlocked with the broader, socioeconomic issues impacting the New Negro community.⁴ In fact, Baker’s own “blues matrix” and “blues geographies” are especially useful concepts that help elucidate the political and aesthetic forces at play in and around the jazz-addict subculture.⁵ Baker writes that, “The matrix is a point of ceaseless input and output, a web of intersecting, crisscrossing impulses always in productive transit.”⁶ This blues matrix designates the intricate wellspring of African-American cultural potentiality. In both novels, such potentiality flourishes in a multiplicity of inputs, outputs, intersections, and impulses that trigger and sustain the jazz-addict subculture.⁵

This essay begins by considering how the underground blues geography of Harlem’s cabarets and speakeasies gave rise to the jazz-addict subculture and how this subculture situated itself spatially and ideologically in relation to the political terrain of Harlem’s New Negro community. The essay then engages with two pivotal aesthetic features of the novels and the subculture they depict. First considered is the authors’ use of a Signifyin(g) black vernacular, to use Henry Louis Gates’s term, which amplifies the coalescing sounds of jazz and drug vocabularies. Van Vechten and McKay show how a jazz-addict vernacular becomes a mark of distinction that separates the subculture from its New Negro neighbors, and how its linguistic structure mirrors the subculture’s investment in dynamic, flexible, and improvisatory cultural exchange. The essay concludes by discussing how Van Vechten and McKay produce Harlem Renaissance adaptations of the Orientalist fantasies modeled by Thomas De Quincey, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles Baudelaire in attempts to describe drug-induced hallucinations and the general saturnalia of the jazz-addict subculture. By supplementing the black vernacular descriptions of spaces, people, and sounds with the imagery and textures of the romanticist experience of being on drugs, Van Vechten and McKay effectively locate an Afro-Orientalist imagination thriving within Harlem—an imagination that is not merely indulgent exoticism, but an active political part of the Harlem Renaissance.

Space, Style, Subculture

It is perhaps W. E. B. Du Bois who best pinpointed a key conflict of cultural and and geographical values that ostensibly exacerbated the rift between the jazz-addict subculture and certain members of the New Negro community. Du Bois’s vision of Harlem tied the success of social advancement to the neighborhood’s physical and cultural growth. In Black Empire, Michelle Stephens explains how Du Bois stressed the importance of “a rootedness in Harlem [that underscored] a belief in the steady advance of black life in America through class mobility, racial integration, and national citizenship.” Pursuant to this vision, Du Bois wanted representations of...