scholarly journals The African-American Poets' Struggle for the Rights of People: A Study in Claude McKay's Selected Poems

Twejer ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 821-866
Author(s):  
Hameed Abdullah Mustafa ◽  
◽  
Sherzad Shafi'h Barzani
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
American Poets ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This study scrutinizes selected protest poems written by the prominent black poet of the Harlem Renaissance Claude McKay (1889-1948). McKay is considered as a key literary figure of the Negro movement who played a significant role in struggling for and awakening his own people to demand their rights. His major aspiration was to end all forms of prejudice and oppression against blacks portrayed in his poems during the most effective movement in African American literary history comprising the times between 1920 to almost the mid-1930s. McKay established himself as a powerful literary voice for social justice during the Harlem Renaissance constantly struggling for people's identity and rights against the widespread prejudice, segregation, and racism against blacks in America and worldwide along with his pride in his black race and culture. These central issues had different impacts on the Harlem Renaissance and on the lives and works of those who participated in that movement; depicting how both race and racism could define the African American experience in the early twentieth century, as well. McKay, skillfully combined traditional forms and political protest in many of his sonnets. He took the old poetic genre and made it new and relevant to his own project by examining within its bounds unconventional and contemporary subjects. Along with his poetic diction and imagery, he juxtaposes contrasting images to show the hypocritic nature of America, showing his inevitable faith in the country. McKay's enthusiasm for and belief in the authority of intellectuals was strengthened by his understanding of America's deep-rooted racism. He closes many of his sonnets with gloomy observations of blacks' sufferings. The clear conclusion of his struggle was the fact that negro writers succeeded in showcasing the sufferings of people, incited blacks to demand their legal rights, and proved they are capable of everything and as genius as whites. Keywords: McKay, Struggles, Racism, identity, prejudice, rights.

Autochthonomous Ambiguities

2020 ◽  
pp. 150-186
Author(s):  
Myriam J. A. Chancy
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Zora Neale Hurston ◽  
The State ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter concludes the study by examining exchanges between African American and Afro-Caribbean contexts, as expressed in Harlem Renaissance texts. Jacques Rancière’s concepts of engaged spectatorship and subject emancipation are used to analyze intra-African Diasporic exchanges in postcolonial contexts. The chapter focuses on works by writers of the Harlem Renaissance with specific attention to their apprehension of Haitian history and folklore as an expression of autochthonomous realities. The chapter argues that what made it possible for Harlem Renaissance writers to identify with cultures and aesthetics produced by other writers and cultures of the African Diaspora was the movement’s professed search and advocacy for an African American sensibility that would birth a “New Negro” not defined by the state, or by a history of subjugation. Works by Zora Neale Hurston and Claude McKay show an impulse that was not one of domination, such as we see reflected in traditional travel texts, but one of af/filiation (as defined in previous chapters).

scholarly journals Harlem Renaissance Literary Productions: Context, Role, Philosophy and Objective In “The Negro’s Tragedy”

2020 ◽  
pp. 159-203
Author(s):  
Beugre Zouankouan Stéphane
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
Hermeneutic Approach ◽  
Black Movement ◽  
Poetic Creation ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This paper aims to show and analyze how through “an outstanding poetic creation”, Claude McKay describes clearly the context, role, philosophy and objective of the Harlem Renaissance literary productions while describing his own role and vocation as an African American writer. Indeed by describing his own role as a pioneer of the Harlem Renaissance Movement, “this assertive poem” is actually a précis and paradigm of the motives and chart gathering all those black pioneer writers engaged in this literary movement. This paper provides, through the hermeneutic study of this symptomatic sonnet about the Negro’s tragedy; an analysis of the context in which the Harlem Renaissance literary productions had been produced, the role of those literary productions, the main philosophy surrounding the literary productions of this Black Movement and finally the objective targeted by those literary productions. The hermeneutic approach is sustained by the socio-criticism, African American criticisms and stylistics theories to better characterize the semantic and social scope of this poem.  

scholarly journals The Depths of My Africa: Travelogues on the Land of Ancestors by Claude McKay and Langston Hughes

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-236
Author(s):  
Daria D. Kuzina
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
The Real ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
American Artist ◽  
Significant Figures ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance ◽  
New Look

The article is devoted to the image of Africa in the travelogues by poets Claude McKay (A Long Way From Home, 1937) and Langston Hughes (The Big Sea, 1940), the significant figures of Harlem Renaissance; and also compares this image with Africa in the poems of both writers. The image of Africa as the land of ancestors and the foremother of the Negro people was popular among the artists and philosophers of the Harlem Renaissance, but at the same time, it was often idealized. That is why meeting a real Africa becomes, to some extent, a moment of truth for an African-American artist, the reason to take a new look at himself and his values. Biographies of Hughes and McKay reveal why equally motivated, at first glance, writers united by a common dream of a black peoples home, when faced with the real Africa, react to it in exactly the opposite way. The article shows that young cosmopolitan poet Langston Hughes did not find respond to his poetic ideals in real Africa and after that forever divided Africa into real and poetic, while Claude McKay, who kept up the reunification of the Negro people and had traveled around the whole Europe, only in Africa for the first time in his life went native. At the same time, Hughes is significantly influenced by his mixed origins and McKay - by his colonial background. The article contains materials of correspondence, fragments of the travelogues never been translated into Russian before.

Locke, Alain LeRoy (1885–1954)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridget Chalk ◽  
Cocoa Williams ◽  
Sarah Fedirka
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Cultural Relativism ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Jessie Fauset ◽  
Graduate Degrees ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

Alain Locke was an American philosopher, editor, and critic whose influence helped to inscribe modernist aesthetics within the history of black artistry, which he defined in philosophical and political as well as artistic terms. His guest editorship of the March 1925 Survey Graphic magazine’s special edition on race, which he titled "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro" and which he edited and extended to create his anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation of Negro Life, is generally considered a seminal moment in the founding of the Harlem Renaissance. Published in 1925, The New Negro includes contributions from what Locke called the rising generation of "Negro Youth" writers, including Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jessie Fauset, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen. Locke's introduction to the volume announced a new age in African American aesthetics, one which abandoned the direct political objectives of racial uplift and dedicated itself to merging folk art with artistic experimentation. Locke was born in Philadelphia, received undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard, and was the first African American Rhodes Scholar. His philosophical theories focused on race relations, cultural relativism, and pluralism, interests he extended to his promotion of writers and artists now associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

scholarly journals The dialectics of homeland and identity: Reconstructing Africa in the poetry of Langston Hughes and Mohamed Al-Fayturi

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-74
Author(s):  
Saddik M. Gohar
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
African History ◽  
American Experience ◽  
African People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Realistic Image ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

The article investigates the dialectics between homeland and identity in the poetry of the Sudanese poet, Mohamed Al-Fayturi and his literary master, Langston Hughes in order to underline their attitudes toward crucial issues integral to the African and African-American experience such as identity, racism, enslavement and colonisation. The article argues that – in Hughes’s early poetry –Africa is depicted as the land of ancient civilisations in order to strengthen African-American feelings of ethnic pride during the Harlem Renaissance. This idealistic image of a pre-slavery, a pre-colonial Africa, argues the paper, disappears from the poetry of Hughes, after the Harlem Renaissance, to be replaced with a more realistic image of Africa under colonisation. The article also demonstrates that unlike Hughes, who attempts to romanticize Africa, Al-Fayturi rejects a romantic confrontation with the roots. Interrogating western colonial narratives about Africa, Al-Fayturi reconstructs pre-colonial African history in order to reveal the tragic consequences of colonisation and slavery upon the psyche of the African people. The article also points out that in their attempts to confront the oppressive powers which aim to erase the identity of their peoples, Hughes and Al-Fayturi explore areas of overlap drama between the turbulent experience of African-Americans and the catastrophic history of black Africans dismantling colonial narratives and erecting their own cultural mythology.

Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance: A Biography

1987 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 1083 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Stein ◽  
Wayne F. Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

Gwendolyn Bennett's “The Ebony Flute”

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (3) ◽  
pp. 744-755
Author(s):  
Belinda Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
African American ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
Assistant Editor ◽  
Cover Art ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

IntroductionGwendolyn Bennett (1902-81) is often mentioned in books that discuss the harlem renaissance, and some of her poems Occasionally appear in poetry anthologies; but much of her career has been overlooked. Along with many of her friends, including Jessie Redmond Fauset, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen, Bennett was featured at the National Urban League's Civic Club Dinner in March 1924, an event that would later be “widely hailed as a ‘coming out party’ for young black artists, writers, and intellectuals whose work would come to define the Harlem Renaissance” (McHenry 383n100). In the next five years Bennett published over forty poems, short stories, and reviews in leading African American magazines and anthologies, such as Cullen's Caroling Dusk (1927) and William Stanley Braithwaite's Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1927; she created magazine cover art that adorned two leading African American periodicals, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races and the National Urban League's Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life; she worked as an editor or assistant editor of several magazines, including Opportunity, Black Opals, and Fire!; and she wrote a renowned literary column, “The Ebony Flute.” Many scholars, such as Cary Wintz, Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson, and Elizabeth McHenry, recognized the importance of Bennett's column to the Harlem Renaissance in their respective studies, but their emphasis on a larger Harlem Renaissance discussion did not afford a detailed examination of her column.

Conclusion: Noah’s Kin

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Scott Parrish
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Mass Audience ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter considers the question of what made the recent disaster called Katrina in 2005, and its mediation, distinct from its 1927 forerunner. It argues that what was most different about the two events is that artists and commentators in 2005 could be more openly critical of the racial and class dimensions of their disaster before a multiracial mass audience. The chapter also considers a poem that appeared in print in April 1927, which must have seemed a providential coincidence to many readers. The poem, called “Noah Built the Ark,” moves from the halcyon days in Eden to the point at which “God got sorry that he ever made man.” Like other works of the Harlem Renaissance, the poem called upon the currency of folk form to create a public awareness of traditions within African American culture.

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