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

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.

Northern Cheyenne Exodus and Negroes Lynching: Historical Novels of Howard Fast in the USSR

The article deals with the historical novels reception of Howard Fast (a writer who was extremely popular in the 1950s, though he is almost forgotten now) in the Soviet Union. Once a USA Communist Party member loyal to the USSR, he became a fierce opponent of Soviet communism. The analysis of the American context uncovers the reasons why the author of left-wing beliefs turned to the genre of a historical novel and peculiarities of the literary market he faced. A close study of Soviet reviews demonstrates that the novels The Last Frontier and The Freedom Road were perceived by Soviet literary critics as Fasts protest against racial discrimination and growing right-wing sentiment. These problems were a matter of urgency against the background of the McCarthy campaign, which Fast fell victim to in 1947. His novel The Freedom Road was put on the stage in Moscow theaters. According to Soviet reviewers, the absence of decadent primitivism set Fast apart from other once-friendly Soviet writers such as Richard Wright and Claude McKay. Within this tradition of exoticism criticism, dating back to the 1920s and 1930s, novels about distant lands were highly appreciated only when ethnographic descriptions were used for consistent social criticism. Being a committed supporter of the concept art as a weapon developed in the Soviet Union, Fast perceived exaggerated exoticism, top-heavy descriptions of historical novels as a sign of escapist literature that ignores the method of dialectical materialism.

«The white man is a Tiger at my throat» or the parable of the three bad foundations of human existence: the racial foundation, the hegemonic foundation, and the economic-materialist foundation

This paper studies the poem “Tiger” by Claude Mckay from a metaphorical perspective in order to find out and highlight all the possible hidden meanings about the quality of the white man characterized as a “tiger” in the expression “the white man is a tiger at my throat”. This study will be conducted under theories such as stylistics, hermeneutics and sociocriticism and thanks to those theories; we have explored the plurality of meanings of this sonnet by McKay. The meaning revolves around the white man and his role in the life and existence of black people, but also it sheds light on the new deals or bases or foundations which are race, hatred, power and money that the white people have implemented in human existence and the outcomes of those news deals and foundations in everyday life. It is therefore a metaphorical study at three levels in this paper which appreciate the relationships between different races and namely between black people and white people. Through images, symbols and metaphors, the characteristics of the white man in human existence have been presented.

“No Man’s Ocean Ever Did Get the Best of Me”

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.

Transatlantic Topographies

This first chapter explores the geographical and historical sweep of the modernist vertical imagination in both Europe and the Americas. It begins with comparisons between Franz Kafka’s imagined Amerika and Max Weber’s writings on the “spirit of capitalism” after traveling to the United States, as well as W.E.B. Du Bois’ conceptions of racial stratification and uplift after studying in Germany. From here, it considers the rise of American empire and capitalist culture in terms of industrial scale, vertical elevation, and the “technological sublime.” Key examples include Eugene Jolas’ Verticalist movement in relation to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in relation to the rise of New York City; major writings by Vicente Huidobro, Jorge Luis Borges, Hart Crane, George Oppen, and Claude McKay; and conceptions of racial stratification, uplift, and solidarity in Richard Wright’s Native Son, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.

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

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.

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

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.

Faces of Blackness: The Creation of the New Negro and Négritude Movements in Harlem and Paris

This article explores the cultural and ideological link between the New Negro Movement of Harlem and the Négritude Movement of Paris from 1920s to the 1940s. It examines how the works of African American, Caribbean, and African authors such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Sedar Senghor amongst others are, despite their different backgrounds, united by the common themes of racialized oppression, cultural alienation, and pride in their African heritage. The article also addresses social, cultural and theoretical shortcomings of the New Negro and Négritude movements, which have resulted in widespread criticism of theories of Black culture and identity. Lastly, it explains how the values promoted by New Negro and Négritude literarure remain useful in catalyzing social change today.