Between diaspora and internationalism: Claude McKay and the making of a black public intellectual

This project looks at a diasporic esthetic at the beginning of the twentieth century that was in opposition to Empire and imperialism, based in part upon a particular set of cultural transactions and migrations that redefined categories of colonial subjectivity. I see this esthetic as cross-cultural and international, and concerned with notions of race and location as well as materiality and literary worth. An example of this esthetic can be found in the diasporic sensibility of novelist-poet Claude McKay, who is better known for his association with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. McKay's pioneering travels and cultural observations are a crucial component to comprehending the dimensions and depth of this larger cultural unfolding. McKay skillfully navigated routes into and out of prevailing ideologies of Empire---British, American, European---yet he also transversed routes that had been carved by suffragettes and abolitionists of the nineteenth century.;In exploring this diasporic literary space across borders and desires, I hope to disentangle and, in some measure, dismantle notions of nationalism, progressivism, race, culture, politics, and literary production in an age that's been characterized by Harlem Renaissance literary historian James L. dejongh as "vicious modernism." I hope to show that McKay was at the center of a new sensibility, one that viewed the "literary" and "diaspora" in unique ways.