'Darkly carnal life': Primitivism, queerness, and modernism in Claude McKay's Home to Harlem and Banjo: A Story without a Plot

In the context of reevaluating the cultural productions in the early decades of the twentieth century, primitivism as adopted by visual artists, poets, performers, philosophers, and theorists played a central role in the emergence and evolution of a modern aesthetics. Contemporary criticism has emphasized the importance of the interplay between primitivism and modernism in articulating new forms of expression and identity patterns. The Harlem Renaissance was a period of extensive avant-gardism and of sexual, artistic, and intellectual experimentation; therefore, in the attempt to promote new and revolutionary cultural patterns, the intersection between race and sexual difference as explored by artists and theorists at the time was no longer an end in itself, but was essential in reconstructing the black male's quest for identity. In this respect, a proper examination of the interconnection between primitivism and sexual difference offers a fresh perspective on Claude McKay's literary work. The project focuses on two novels by McKay, namely Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo: A Story without a Plot (1929), which complete and inform each other in illustrating the way in which primitivism and divergent sexuality engage with McKay's politics of identity. Thus, McKay's employment of primitivist and homoerotic discourses in these novels results in the construction of a modern queer black male identity.