Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance

Preface and Acknowledgments

Preface and Acknowledgments Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance is intended to be useful to those working in a range of critical studies . As McKay is among the foremost New Negro movement authors, this work should interest those who study and read African American literature, and not only the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. No scholarship in African American studies has addressed the multilayered queer black Marxism in the New Negro author’s writings, and I would hope that this study might assist in similar efforts to find common ground in habitually discrete critical spheres. I also hope that the book is of use to those interested in postcolonial and négritude studies, as it proposes new ways of approaching the notion of a black diaspora literature. As no critical work has dealt with the way a black modernist period author’s notion of diaspora was linked to sexuality and leftist politics, this book is meant as well to satisfy a want in transnational studies. While touching on transnational and postcolonial studies, I hope that readers of Caribbean literature will find it helpful , particularly those interested in rereading Caribbean writers of the period between the world wars, as McKay is a key Jamaican author. My objective is also that the text will interest those studying twentieth-century transatlantic modernist writers and their literary yield, both poetry and prose. As the work recovers McKay as a radical leftist writer, the text should be of interest to those who are concerned with the history and historiography of the Old Left as well, but also ways in which an Old Left, modernist period author assisted in articulating and challenging assumptions about New Left vocabularies of cultural inquiry. Finally, as the study reexamines his sexuality, I hope it is of use to those who are interested in queer writers—in gender studies and cultural studies—particularly those who are invested in rethinking ways in which race and leftist politics intersect with sexual dissidence. My principal aspiration, however, is to suggest that these allegedly discrete fields of critical taxonomy may find mutual ground in the study of Claude McKay. Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha is meant to have a bearing on the “New American Studies” concern with a postnationalist critique and the employment of cultural studies; consequently, I also hope that it will be useful to those working in North American Studies. For the sake of readability, I have kept my use of abbreviations to a minimum, although the reader should be aware of the following: generally after the initial xii * Preface and Acknowledgments usage, African Blood Brotherhood appears as “ABB,” Industrial Workers of the Worldas“IWW,”CommunistPartyoftheUSAas“CPUSA,”CommunistParty of Great Britain as “CPGB,” Communist Party of the Soviet Union as “CPSU,” and so on. The word Communist generally appears with an uppercase C because I am referring to its proper noun usage, its signing as the Communist Party, whether in the United States, Britain, France, or Russia. By the same token, when I talk of Anarchism with a capital A, I mean the political society, but when I give anarchist a lowercase a, I mean to indicate its manifestation as a philosophy rather than in its organized form. Moreover, though I have listed in my bibliography the titles of the original publications of the poetry, all citations of McKay’s verse will refer to the Complete Poems (2004), edited by William Maxwell, and will be abbreviated as CP when in parentheses. The Complete Poems’s exhaustive annotations and, as its title suggests, comprehensiveness make the text not just an anthology of poetry but indeed a portable archive of McKay’s poetry. Finally, each of the epigraphs included herein is taken from the McKay work named in the chapter. A source note in the endnotes provides further documentation. I am grateful for the assistance of various institutions that supported this endeavor . I thank the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Study for making me a copy of the microfilmed McKay collection, including the entire manuscript of Romance in Marseille, an act of goodwill that made this study possible. I would like to further thank the Schomburg Center, in particular Diana Lachatanere, curator of the Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, for generously granting me permission to quote poetry, fiction, memoir, journalism, and correspondence from the collection of the Claude McKay estate. I thank the archivists at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library...