In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

247 A Mobilized Diaspora: The First World War and Black Soldiers as New Negroes CHAD WILLIAMS 10 By the time he arrived in London, Claude McKay was a rising star. The Jamaica native left for the United States in 1912, attending the Tuskegee Institute and Kansas State University, eventually settling in Harlem. A budding poet who had experienced moderate success, McKay burst onto the literary and political scene with the July 1919 appearance of “If We Must Die,” written in the midst of the summer’s torrent of racial violence. Originally published in the socialist newspaper The Liberator and reprinted in black periodicals throughout the country, “If We Must Die” served as a rallying cry for a postwar generation of African Americans and other peoples of African descent committed to challenging racial injustice. With McKay’s newfound notoriety came an opportunity to travel to London, and, eager to escape America’s volatile racial climate, he departed in fall 1919. McKay did not initially enjoy London, but his comfort level increased when a West Indian student from Oxford introduced him to a local club for black soldiers. “There were a host of colored soldiers in London,” McKay later wrote. They came mostly from the “West Indies and Africa,” although the group included “a few colored Americans, East Indians, and Egyptians.” He regularly frequented the club, listening to the soldiers “telling tales of their war experiences in France, Egypt, and Arabia.” “Many were interested in what American Negroes were thinking and writing,” McKay remembered, and he fulfilled their curiosity by giving them copies of various militant African American publications—The Crisis, The Messenger , the Negro World, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Chicago Defender. Inspired by his interactions, McKay penned a series of articles about the soldiers and their meeting place for his friend Hubert Harrison, the legendary Harlem activist and editor of Marcus Garvey’s Negro World. In this small London basement in Drury Lane, black soldiers from throughout the African diaspora fraternized, exchanged ideas, and, in the process, further shaped the radical consciousness of one of the leading figures in a globally expanding New Negro movement.1 248 CHAD WILLIAMS The close relationship between Claude McKay, soldiers of African descent from the First World War, and the New Negro is not an anomaly. The New Negro was a diasporic figure, and the propagation of this trope directly correlated to the wartime militarization of black communities across the globe. Historian Joseph Harris, in his seminal essay “Dynamics of the Global African Diaspora,” posits the emergence of a “mobilized” modern African diaspora, coinciding with the early-twentieth-century apex of European colonialism, comprising “descendant Africans with a consciousness of the identity of their roots, occupational and communication skills, social and economic status, and access to decision-making bodies in their host country.”2 Harris conceptualizes mobilization in terms of collective political organization around issues of race and ethnicity. But thinking about a different type of mobilization—the mobilization of material, ideas, and, most significantly, men for employment in the First World War—allows for a broader historical understanding of the modern African diaspora. The war set millions of descendant Africans in motion through the demands of combat and labor, bringing them into contact with one another and fundamentally transforming the demographic, ideological, and imaginative contours of the diaspora. Reframing the meaning of mobilization also provides a theoretical entryway into rethinking how we historicize and conceptualize the New Negro of the interwar period. In this essay, I examine the impact of the war on soldiers of African descent and their place, as both symbols and historical actors, in the New Negro movement. Until relatively recently, scholars have examined the New Negro largely as a cultural product, the work of artists, poets, novelists, photographers, and a select group of white and black intellectuals invested in portraying a reconstructed vision of modern blackness. More narrowly, the New Negro is often posited as a distinctly American creation, inextricably linked to the so-called Harlem Renaissance. Fortunately, historians and literary theorists have increasingly begun to challenge these assumptions by placing the New Negro in the context of various social, political, and cultural movements during the war and postwar periods that reached beyond the narrow confines of Harlem and America itself.3 Such an interdisciplinary and geographically broadened approach also allows for an alternative exploration of the symbolic and historical significance of black soldiers during this period. World War I is traditionally cast as a Eurocentric event. Scholars remain...

Share