Claude McKay and Dissident Internationalism

In his contribution to Debating Cosmopolitics, Craig Calhoun poses several questions central to much transnational political theory: “What does it mean to be a ‘citizen of the world’? Through what institutions is this ‘citizenship’ expressed? Is it mediated through various particular, more local solidarities?” (90). Questions like these are at the core of many well-known theories of globality and locality. Arjun Appadurai, for example, examines the multiple ways in which transnational networks play a role in the production of locality, and Homi Bhabha examines the ways in which transnational flows of culture and affect are inscribed in local patterns of contestation.¹ Less familiar, however, is the note of skepticism audible in Calhoun’s interrogation of cosmopolitanism as a political project. When “a large proportion of global civil society—from the World Bank to non-governmental organizations setting accountancy standards—exists to support capitalism and not pursue democracy” (92), what credible institutions of global self-government can we point to? Ultimately, Calhoun argues, if cosmopolitan democracy is to be “more than a good ethical orientation for those privileged to inhabit the frequent traveller lounges, it must put down roots in the solidarities that organize most people’s sense of identity and location in the world” (112); in other words, it must be built from the ground up, from “networks of directly interpersonal social relations, such as those basic to local community” (98).

This ideal of local autonomy within transnational self-government is frequently invoked in contemporary theories of global democracy.² But its practical corollary—what this ideal would look like in terms of institutions, practices, and regulative mechanisms—is often difficult to visualize. For example, in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Gayatri Spivak notes that invocations of local, concrete experience all too often construct the fantasy image of a general will based on “the credit-baited rural woman” who can be “‘format[ted]’ . . . through UN Plans of Action” in the service of an unquestioning “financialization of the globe” (259). Similarly, in “Given Culture: Rethinking Cosmopolitical Freedom in Transnationalism,” Pheng Cheah questions the capacity of local social negotiations to develop a contemporary political life beyond the nation-state: “In the current conjuncture, nationalism cannot be transcended by cosmopolitan forms of solidarity,” since “transnational networks are, in and of themselves, neither mass based nor firmly politically institutionalized” (1998, 312). Moreover, as Cheah further argues in Spectral Nationality, the depredations of multinational capital make “the nation-state necessary as a political agent for defending the peoples of the South from the shortfalls of neocolonial capitalist global restructuring” (2004, 300).

In terms of its institutional imagination, then, transnational theory faces something of an impasse. According to Cheah, celebrations of “endless hybrid self-creation and autonomy from the given” (2004, 301) too often ignore globalization’s other face—forced migrancy, underdevelopment, and neocolonial domination—and tend to articulate purely cultural models of transformative agency, which fail to consider “framework[s] for the distribution and regulation of economic resources and capabilities to satisfy human needs” (2004, 299). At the same time, Cheah admits that the real-world emancipatory resources of the postcolonial state are perpetually contaminated by “comprador indigenous elite[s] in collaboration with multinational capital” (2004, 351). If it is difficult to imagine this transnational administrative elite transforming itself into a neutral arbiter of international justice—it is often just as difficult to imagine local communities evolving their own structures of international self-government without access to the formidable resources of state and interstate institutions.

When facing conceptual impasses of this kind, it is often useful to return to technologies of perception and social speculation that have long been forgotten to see if they can furnish us with anything of contemporary value. It is in this spirit that I would like to reconstruct the intellectual environment and literary worlds of Claude McKay—an author intimately concerned with the problem of international and community self-government, but whose intellectual commitments and figural devices are very different from much of what is to be found in current debates about cosmopolitanism and transnational governance. Like many contemporary theorists, McKay turns to the...