| One of the challenges to the English-speaking segment of the black New World Diaspora has been the need to heal the fragmented consciousness of its collective membership that came about as a consequence of slavery. Claude McKay, who emigrated from the West Indies to North America in 1912, played a bridging role between the literary worlds of these distinct but related territories. The Harlem Renaissance, a black artistic movement in the USA in the 1920s, gave him a forum where the self-determining discourse of the West Indies could energize the conciliatory rhetoric of American civil rights. His multifaceted perspective allows one the opportunity not only to examine disparate trends in West Indian and North American black thought but also to trace a common journey towards Diasporic healing. |
