The Red Is East: Claude McKay and the New Black Radicalism of the Twentieth Century

Black radicalism in the twentieth century was marked by a new emphasis on ideological, intellectual, artistic, and spiritual spaces and circuits outside of what we might normally think of as the “Atlantic World” or the “Black Atlantic.” The expansion and consolidation of European and North American colonies in Asia and across the entire continent of Africa by the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as the rise of various strains of socialist internationalism, caused black radicals to increasingly look beyond as well as across the Atlantic Rim, tracing out new anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and often anti-capitalist connections and revisiting older Afro-Asian links. The rising tide of color, class, and national consciousness in the post-Bolshevik Revolution era encouraged radicals (and reactionaries) of various stripes to make these connections as seen in James Vanderzee’s famous picture of a 1924 parade in Harlem by Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association where marchers carry a sign reading “England Would Do Well To Let Gandhi Go.”

Of course, both black Bolshevism and Garveyism rewrote what might be thought of as colonialist internationalism (as opposed to colonialist Atlanticism). The so-called “Age of Exploration” sought both to circumvent and replicate the longstanding circuits of commerce and culture among Europe, Africa, and Asia that largely fell within the Islamic world that stretched from the Straits of Gibraltar to what are now Indonesia and the southern Philippines. Columbus was, after all, seeking a western route to the East and Henry the Navigator and Vasco da Gama an eastern passage to India. This political, economic, cultural, and ideological linkage of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe intensified during the high era of imperialism during the nineteenth century. It was India, not Canada or Nigeria, which was the “jewel in the crown” of the British Empire.

Increasingly, black militants, especially, but not solely nationalists of one strain or another, came to see the fate of Africa and its diaspora and that of the other colonized peoples of the world as inextricably intertwined, if not essentially the same. Variants of this recognition can be traced from W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous pronouncement about “the color line” as the preeminent problem of the twentieth century through the Garvey movement, the Bolshevik-nationalist–internationalist politics of the African Blood Brotherhood, the work of McKay (a sometime member of the Brotherhood), Elijah Muhammad, and the Nation of Islam’s formulation of an “Afro-Asiatic” identity, to the notion of a “Bandung World” (named after the 1955 conference of African and Asian nations and independence movements that took place in Java) promoted by Malcolm X and taken up with great intensity by many of the young black radicals of the 1960s. In short, though North Americans (and, strangely, some British critics) have had a tendency to emphasize the importance of connections between Europe and the Americas (with the Atlantic coast of Africa as a sort of third leg in a reprise of the famous, if reductive, notion of the “triangle trade”), black radicals have strained at the political and cultural limitations of such a formulation, which fetishizes the relation between the enslaver and the slave and the colonizing nation and the colonized society at the expense of international links between the dispossessed (many of which antedated the Atlantic slave trade and the high era of colonization).

In recent years such scholars as William Maxwell, Kate Baldwin, Michelle Stephens, Winston James, and Brent Edwards have advanced the poet, novelist, and activist Claude McKay as a central figure of this new black internationalist radicalism of the twentieth century, a figure who disrupts many long-held assumptions about the moment, movement, and even the socio-geographical context of the Harlem Renaissance, particularly as codified and promoted by Alain Locke in, among other places, the 1925 Harlem issue of the Survey Graphic that became the core of the anthology The New Negro. Baldwin’s 2002 Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain especially advanced this discussion, making the novel argument that McKay began a tradition of engagement with...