Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era

Part II. Lost Theaters

part ii Lost Theaters Black Transnationalism and a New Negro Politics of Immanence Although scholarship on the New Negro era traditionally has focused on the spaces of Harlem and the United States more generally, several recent studies in black transnationalism have brought attention to the New Negro movement’s intersections with spaces beyond the United States’ borders. Fittingly, scholars oriented toward the New Negro’s transnational circuits have found a sort of favorite son in Jamaican American writer Claude McKay and a touchstone text in McKay’s 1929 novel Banjo, which has a French Mediterranean setting and focuses on a heterogeneous community of black men living on the Marseilles waterfront .1 According to Brent Hayes Edwards, Banjo’s portrayal of a transnational community of black tramps evokes a “vagabond internationalism” marked by radical doubt “that blacks can ‘fit’ into the logics of modern civilization” (198). This is an internationalism of “the unregistered, the undocumented, the untracked.” As such, it “laughs at the logic of consulates” (239). Edwards’s denationalized reading of Banjo finds a counterpoint in Michelle Ann Stephens’s Black Empire (2005), which situates McKay’s novel in relation to a tradition of Caribbean intellectuals who drew on particular and key “element[s] of imperial and national discourse” (14) to arrive at “a transnational form of black nationality” (4). In Banjo, Stephens remarks, the privilege generated by African Americans’ US citizenship creates the novel as both a transnational story and a “story of imperial American nationhood” (183).2 66 / lost theaters The black transnational formations described respectively by Edwards and Stephens may be conceptualized through two political modes discussed by Paul Gilroy: the politics of transfiguration and the politics of fulfillment. The politics of transfiguration, says Gilroy, “strives in pursuit of the sublime” (Black 38), in pursuit of “qualitatively new . . . social relations . . . and modes of association” (37). The politics of fulfillment, meanwhile, “is mostly content to play occidental rationality at its own game” (38). It “demands . . . that bourgeois civil society live up to the promises of its own rhetoric” (37). Edwards’s vagabond internationalism laughs at the logics of modern civilization and hence allies itself with transfiguration, while Stephens’s black empire resembles fulfillment as it draws on imperial and national discourse. In bringing focus to New Negro participation in official international diplomacy, Artistic Ambassadors limns a third political mode. This is a politics of immanence. Immanence neither laughs derisively nor makes demands but rather, in resonance with the diplomatic construct of representative character, recognizes itself as partially constitutive of the West and hence partially empowered in constituting its present and its destiny.3 Like fulfillment and transfiguration, the politics of immanence makes itsappearanceinBanjo’sheteroglossiaofblackinternationalisms.During the novel’s third section, the African American character Goosey leaves his vagabond life in Marseilles and travels to “a town near Lyon,” where he learns he will not be permitted to work “unless he [can] obtain French papers.” Goosey asks for aid from the town’s resident American consul, who cannot offer any help. Discouraged, Goosey returns to Marseilles, where a friend tells him “that the consul was Negroid, for he had read about him and seen his photograph in an American Negro publication.” The consul had been “so near white” that Goosey had not realized he “was a colored man” (253). Banjo’s Negroid consul is an unadorned representation of William Henry Hunt, who worked near Lyon at the consulate in Saint-Étienne from 1907 until the consulate’s closing in 1927.4 As Banjo offers a literary representation of Hunt’s light skin and distinguished appearances in such New Negro periodicals as the Crisis,5 it conveys the image of an elite New Negro movement that stakes its internationalism not to transfiguration or fulfillment but rather to a politics of immanence permitting diplomatic protocol to obviate New Negro internationalists’ race-based allegiances: the Negroid consul is unidentifiable as black, he does not identify himself as such, and he will not be influenced by racial concerns in performing his official duties. While Banjo’s larger cast of undocumented vagabonds may be conceptualized through what Ifeoma lost theaters / 67 Kiddoe Nwankwo has termed black “cosmopolitanism from below” (14), the novel’s treatment of Consul Hunt frames the internationalism of the New Negro establishment as a racially ineffectual cosmopolitanism from above. In this vein of New Negro internationalism, color becomes incidental, and insider status (within the nation and the international community...