Pub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-8814983
Eric Newman
This essay argues that the queer romances at the margins of Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille operate as sites of possibility for a happy, egalitarian social relation that is longed for but not otherwise accessible in the novel. The essay contends that this novel, read against Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929), offers one of the most sustained, nuanced representations of queer life in McKay’s archive and in early twentieth-century LGBT literature more generally, one in which same-sex-oriented characters are rendered as normal, integral figures in urban life rather than as outré characters whose primary function is to add spice to the narrative. As the novel demonstrates the continuing appeal of queerness as a site for imagining a more liberated, loving form of social organization—one that relishes the pleasure-in-difference that is a hallmark of McKay’s writing—it also anticipates formations within the queer liberationist politics of the decades that followed.
本文认为，克劳德·麦凯（Claude McKay）的《马赛罗曼史》（Romance in Marseille）边缘的酷儿罗曼史是一种幸福、平等的社会关系的可能场所，这种关系在小说中是渴望的，但在其他方面是无法获得的。这篇文章认为，这部小说与《哈莱姆之家》（1928年）和《班卓》（1929年）相反，在麦凯的档案和20世纪初的LGBT文学中，提供了对酷儿生活最持久、最细致入微的描述之一，在这部小说中，以同性为导向的角色被渲染为正常的，城市生活中不可或缺的人物，而不是那些主要功能是为叙事增添趣味的另类人物。这部小说展示了酷儿作为一个想象一种更自由、更爱的社会组织形式的场所的持续吸引力——一种享受差异中的快乐的社会组织，这是麦凯写作的标志——它也预示着接下来几十年酷儿解放主义政治的形成。
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Pub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-8815027
N. Cannon
By the late 1920s steam travel was faster, more comfortable, and more affordable than ever before, and there were more shipping lines, operating more ships, than in the past. The major lines could not compete with one another in terms of cost or speed, so they wooed customers by focusing on passenger comfort, attempting to one-up each other’s luxury. It is in this context that Claude McKay wrote a novel about an African seaman who makes two miserable passages across the Atlantic—the first as a stowaway, the second in first class. This article reads McKay’s novel as a revision of the narrative of liberating and luxurious ocean travel promoted by the shipping lines and argues that Romance in Marseille offers novel possibilities and implications for maritime and oceanic studies because it asks readers to recognize overlaps between different forms of mobility and, in characteristic McKay fashion, to resist reductive interpretation.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-8815038
Laura A. Winkiel
This article explores the relation between the dockside denizens of Claude McKay’s Marseille and the violent history of slavery and racism. It takes a longue durée approach to modernism by arguing that the previous five hundred years of colonization and conquest of Black and Indigenous life continue to constrain the possibilities of freedom imagined in the art and literature of the early twentieth century. Using Édouard Glissant’s poetics of relation, it considers how the shoreline in Romance in Marseille provides a fecund location for sifting through the residues of slavery to salvage possibilities for living otherwise than the racist state demands. In so doing, Romance in Marseille goes further than McKay’s other novels in asserting that Black femininity must be central to a Black reinvention of the human.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-8814994
L. Ryan
This article argues that Romance in Marseille marks a significant shift in Claude McKay’s approach to primitivism, one that necessitates a reconsideration of his reputation—based on his two novels of the late 1920s—as perhaps the Harlem Renaissance’s foremost proponent of “strategic primitivism.” Tracing the development of McKay’s primitivism from Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929) to his most recently published novel, this essay suggests an evolution along philosophical, political, and stylistic lines. Romance in Marseille deconstructs the primitive/civilized binary, forgoing the antiracist potentialities of primitivism for the utopian possibilities of international Marxism, interracial collaboration and queer love.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-8815104
Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy
I n his classic text, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, MichelRolph Trouillot asked of the Haitian Revolution: “Howdoes one write a history of the impossible?”1 Planters and colonial powers represented the thirteen-year event that resulted in the enslaved overthrow of colonial power and the independent state of Haiti (the first black republic of the Atlantic World) as an “unthinkable history,” “a non-event,” even as it was happening. Although Trouillot wrote specifically of Haiti, his work on how social and political inequalities of the past shape the ways historical events are recorded in their moment and then archived, retrieved, and written about in the present is widely applicable to historians of slavery. The archive of slavery is steeped in silences. This is true especially for the colonial Caribbean, where enslaved individuals left few if any sources of their own and often appear in the archives as voiceless and fleeting figures. In this way, to write a history that recognizes the complex personhood of the enslaved, while adhering to traditional disciplinary methodologies, appears to be nearly impossible. How do historians of slavery, facedwith a disruptive, fragmented, and contested archive, recreate the lifeworlds of enslaved individuals who appear as fleeting moments in the archives?2 How do we engage with an archive and a discipline very much tied to imperialism and colonial violence? How do historians make space for a cultural and social history of the enslaved while recognizing the condition of slavery, which betokens alienation, abjection, and social death? While Trouillot acknowledged that “history is the fruit of power,” it is for this reason that wemust study its production: “Power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous.” Indeed, Trouillot argued that “the ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.”3 The three articles under consideration here reveal the fraught relationship historians have with the archive of slavery and the ways in which we might address the silences that abound in it. One of the fundamental challenges historians of slavery face is how to exhume the lives of the enslaved from the archive of slavery. Saidiya Hartman begins “The Dead Book Revisited” by asking: “Howdowe attend to black death? Howdowe find life where only traces of destructions remain?”4 Reflecting on two of her previous
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Pub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-8814961
Jesse W. Schwartz
This essay examines the numerous critical claims of “timeliness” around the recently recovered novel Romance in Marseille as well as Claude McKay’s own numerous commitments and challenges as they emerge therein: the multiple and enduring afterlives of slavery, the Bolshevik Revolution and the burgeoning of its stiflingly bureaucratic Thermidor under Stalin, the various theoretical and programmatic complications that issues of race and gender posed for international socialism alongside the promises and disappointments of emancipatory politics writ large. However, in attempting to adjudicate such problematics of difference, McKay also provides the outlines of a dialectical “Black Intersectional International,” thereby gesturing toward a “commonism” of the quayside.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-8815140
Marisa J. Fuentes
H ow do we redress the ongoing violence of slavery’s archive and its effects on our present? Thinking with three recent articles that address the history of slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic world, the following short reflection considers different approaches to contextualizing Black lives in the past and present.1 Two of the three articles, by Stephanie E. Smallwood and Saidiya Hartman, critically engage Hartman’s 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts.”2 The third article, Simon P. Newman’s “Freedom-Seeking Slaves in England and Scotland, 1700– 1780,” explores hundreds of eighteenth-century newspaper advertisements for runaway enslaved (and “servant”) men and women in England and Scotland. For vastly different audiences and to different ends, Hartman, Smallwood, and Newman contend with the erasures of enslaved people from the archives and national or imperial historiographies. Seemingly disconnected by geographies, methods, and fields, these articles, brought together in conversation, invite us to consider the state of historical research on Black lives and how to approach their erasure in the field of history. In the wake of her previous work and a summer of intense police brutality, Hartman writes about the stakes of engaging slavery’s archive in the enduring context of Black death, the seemingly unchanged patterns of anti-Black violence, and how wemust make room for the ways in which Black people live, mourn, and steal away to grieve in themidst of this ongoing terror.3 Smallwood, in revisiting “Venus in TwoActs,” reassesses her ownbook, Saltwater Slavery, to demonstrate themethod of exploring the “counter-factual”—what is in the archive but is denied—as the starting point to writing histories of slavery (or the slave trade). Smallwood also offers us an incredibly thorough historiography of the uses of slavery’s archive from the early twentieth century—when the planter’s perspective prevailed in authority and objectivity—to the 1970s, when social historians shifted their method to “bottom up” by using an “abundance” of archival material to tell the enslaved story. What Smallwood points out, important to us for this short reflection, is the move to quantitative methods—the counting and tallying and charting of bodies, demographics, and geographies that gavehistorians “evidence” that enslavedpeople shaped
我们如何纠正奴隶制档案中持续存在的暴力行为及其对我们现在的影响？考虑到最近三篇关于大西洋世界奴隶制和奴隶贸易历史的文章，以下简短的反思考虑了过去和现在黑人生活的不同背景。1斯蒂芬妮·E·斯莫尔伍德和赛迪娅·哈特曼的三篇文章中有两篇批判性地引用了哈特曼2008年的文章《两幕中的维纳斯》。2第三篇文章，西蒙·P·纽曼（Simon P.Newman）的《1700–1780年英格兰和苏格兰寻求自由的奴隶》（Freedom Seeking Slaves in England and Scotland，1700-1780）探讨了数百则18世纪报纸上关于英格兰和苏格兰逃亡的奴隶（和“仆人”）男女的广告。对于截然不同的观众和不同的目的，哈特曼、斯莫尔伍德和纽曼都在努力从档案和国家或帝国历史中抹去被奴役的人。这些文章似乎与地理、方法和领域脱节，在对话中汇集在一起，邀请我们思考黑人生活的历史研究现状，以及如何在历史领域消除黑人生活。在她之前的工作和一个夏天的警察暴行之后，哈特曼写到了在黑人死亡的持久背景下使用奴隶制档案的利害关系，反黑人暴力的看似不变的模式，以及我们必须如何为黑人的生活方式、哀悼方式和在这场持续的恐怖中偷偷溜走悲伤的方式腾出空间，在重温《两幕中的维纳斯》时，她重新评估了自己的书《盐水奴隶制》，以展示探索“反事实”的方法——档案中有什么，但被否认了——作为书写奴隶制（或奴隶贸易）历史的起点。斯莫尔伍德还为我们提供了一个令人难以置信的关于奴隶制档案使用的全面历史记录，从20世纪初——当时种植园主的观点在权威和客观性方面占主导地位——到20世纪70年代，社会历史学家通过使用“丰富”的档案材料来讲述被奴役的故事，将他们的方法转向了“自下而上”。斯莫尔伍德指出，对我们来说，这一简短的反思很重要，是向定量方法的转变——对身体、人口统计和地理的统计、统计和制图，为历史学家提供了奴隶塑造的“证据”
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Pub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-8815060
David B. Hobbs
Abstract:Reassessing Claude McKay's writing about North Africa, this article contends that McKay saw sites in this region as uniquely felicitous to staging conversations between global socialism and the Black diasporic avant-garde. His attention to site-specific interracial urban cultures serves as a counterpoint to the Depression-fueled Pan-Africanism that increasingly defined W. E. B. Du Bois's editorials for the Crisis. At the same time, McKay's persistent interest in the activities of the Liberator suggests a surprising resonance between their aesthetics to his locodescriptive verse. Bringing these strands together, the article finds that McKay did not seek a synesthetic resolution to the question of organizing an urban community or an integrationist racial future but, rather, sought to highlight the importance of dissensus despite global uncertainty. The article considers McKay's formal poetics and fiction together, comparing his visual tactics with the French and British Colonial Expositions' "panoramas."
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Pub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-8815071
M. Collins
Abstract:This article considers Claude McKay's Romance in Marseille through two emerging fields of study: "Afropessimism" and anthropological theories of the "liminal hotspot." It suggests that McKay's novel functions as a critique of positive Harlem Renaissance images of diasporic movement by highlighting how racial "Blackness" functions as a system for rejecting people of color from the benefits of modernity and sovereign rights-bearing status in an expanded temporal and spatial frame. To explore this hypothesis, the article turns to new anthropological work on the liminal hotspot as a site of sustained, unresolved transition, reading the affectivity of diaspora as a negative one in McKay's work that places an unsustainable pressure on ritual and performative stylizations and renders them untenable as forms for cultivating a sovereign condition.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-8814972
A. Tuszyńska
This article examines the politics of transgressive pleasure and desire in Claude McKay’s novel Romance in Marseille, as a response to what Achille Mbembe, departing from Foucault’s notion of biopower, has termed necropolitics. In the novel, the interlocking hegemonic systems of racism and capitalism function as mechanisms of necropower—the power of determining whose lives are deemed worthy and whose bodies are deemed disposable—which is executed through the procedures of mutilation, surveillance, poverty, and sexual exploitation. Foregrounding the titular “romance,” McKay’s novel features characters who engage in romantic and sexual relationships that subvert the expectations of heteronormativity, sexual economy, and the color line. Anticipating the twenty-first-century theories that locate sovereign power in the body, McKay politicizes and radicalizes desire as a response to the racialization, criminalization, and dehumanization of his novel’s lumpen characters.
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