2. Claude McKay
(1889-1948)
Major Works
Poetry Collections
Songs of Jamaica (1911)
Constab Ballads (1912)
Spring in New Hampshire (1920)
Harlem Shadows (1922)
Novels
Home to Harlem (1928)
Banjo (1929)
Gingertown (1931)
Banana Bottom (1933)
Autobiography: A Long Way From
Home (1937)
Sociological Study: Harlem: Negro
Metropolis (1940)
3. Home to Harlem (1928)
• Published while McKay was in France; he had
left the United States in 1922, six years before
its publication.
• Wildly popular in New York before the stock
market crashed in 1929.
• Sold 11,000 copies in its first two
weeks of publication, 50,000 during the
first year.
• Considered one of the first African American
best sellers.
• Praised by white critics and condemned by
African American leaders and publications.
4. Responses to Home to Harlem
Praised by white critics
One white reviewer wrote that the novel showed “the real thing in
rightness. . . the lowdown on Harlem, the dope from the inside.”
Condemned by African American leaders when it was published
“Home to Harlem] for the most part nauseates me, and after [reading]
the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath. . . . It looks
as though McKay has set out to cater to that prurient demand on the
part of the white folk for a portrayal in Negroes of that licentiousness
which conventional civilization holds white folk back from enjoying.”
—W. E. B. Du Bois, review in Crisis (1928)
“White people think we are buffoons, thugs, and rotters anyway. Why
should we waste so much time trying to prove it? That’s what Claude
McKay had done.”
— Dewey Jones, Chicago Defender (black newspaper)
5. Responses to Home to Harlem
Celebrated by younger Harlem Renaissance writers
“Undoubtedly it is the finest thing ‘we’ve’ done yet. . . . Your novel
ought to give a second youth to the Negro Vogue.”
Home to Harlem will become “the flower of the Negro Renaissance,
even if it is no lovely lily” (1 Mar 1928 letter to Alain Locke).
—Langston Hughes on Home to Harlem
Scholars are fascinated, even perplexed by it today
“Few African American works have aroused more unease among black
middle-class reformers and critics than Home to Harlem.”
—Wayne F. Cooper, Oxford Companion to African American Literature
“Of all the major Afro American writers who emerged in the 1920’s,
Claude McKay remains the most controversial and least understood”
(ix).
—Wayne F. Cooper’s 1987 foreword to Home to Harlem
6. Responses to Home to Harlem
With Home to Harlem, McKay began a fictional search for value,
meaning, and self-direction in modern Afro-American existence that
would preoccupy him in future works. Despite all the brave assertions
of Afro-American vitality and joy in the novel, it was a troubled book by
an author whose own tensions and doubts were never far from the
surface. Nevertheless, McKay’s portraits of Jake and Ray were positive
ones. Threads of affirmation and hope pervade their story that, with few
exceptions, have remained constant in black fiction, despite the
enormity of the problems that still beset America’s black inner cities
today. McKay believed that the black folk wisdom brought to the
nation’s cities in the Great Migration northward that began in his day
was exemplified in men like Jake in home to Harlem. These men
possessed both a hard realism and a generosity of spirit upon which
the black community had to build if it were ever to take control of its
own destiny and cease to be the victim of heedless American
capitalism that viewed Afro-Americans as inert pawns upon a
chessboard of profit and loss.” (xxv-xxvi)
—William S. Cooper’s 1987 foreword to Home to Harlem
13. Major Published Works
• Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934) novel
• Mules and Men (1935) African American
folklore
• Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) novel
• Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and
Jamaica (1938) Anthropological collection
• Moses Man of the Mountain (1941) novel
• Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) autobiography
• Seraph on the Suwanee (1948) novel
15. colorism, “color struck”: a hierarchy
within African American culture (and
within many communities) in which
light skin is more valued than dark
skin. The lighter skinned a person is,
the more worthy the person is
considered within the community.
17. The Cakewalk
“Close Competition at the Cake Walk,” by H. M. Petit, 1899.
Original caption in Leslie’s Weekly read: “A popular diversion of the
colored people, in which many white persons manifest great
interest.”
18. The Cakewalk
Watch a cakewalk, c. 1900
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG03/lucas/cakewalk.mov
19. Hurston on
Writing Beyond the Stereotypes
• “What White Publishers Won’t Print” (1950): A call for
publishers to publish literature that considers “the internal lives
and emotions” of African Americans.
• Her essay laments “the lack of literature about the higher
emotions and love life of upper-class Negroes and minorities in
general.”
• “It is urgent to realize that the minorities do think, and think
about something other than the race problem. That they are
very human and internally, according to natural endowment,
are just like everybody else.”
• “As long as the majority cannot conceive of a Negro or a Jew
feeling and reacting inside just as they do, the majority will
keep right on believing that people who do not look like them
cannot possibly feel as they do.”
20. On Hurston’s Contribution
• Their Eyes celebrates African American culture while revising those
traditions to empower black women, according to literary critic Mary
Helen Washington.
• It portrays the emotion and internal thoughts of African Americans,
something Hurston lamented that white publishers would not print.
• It is the story of a woman in search of self, moving from the position
as object of the male gaze to her own subject who has agency.
• It is a story of self-empowerment, ultimately a story of an African
American woman finding voice in a racist capitalist patriarchy.
• Janie’s journey says something that is still relevant today.
Lucy Anne Hurston wrote in her recent biography of
her aunt: “She thought and acted like a feminist,
before the term was even coined.”
Speak, So You Can Speak Again: The Life of Zora
Neale Hurston (2004)
21. On Hurston’s Detractors
• Criticized in 1937 by some Harlem Renaissance leaders
and younger African American writers for romanticizing
African American life and avoiding the race problem.
• Richard Wright argued that the novel caters to whites
by portraying African Americans the way whites want to see them and
perpetuating the harmful stereotypes of the minstrel tradition (review in New
Masses, October 1937):
“Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition
that was forced upon the Negro in the theater, that is, the
minstrel technique that make the ‘white folks’ laugh.”
“Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they
swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit
in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter
and tears.”
• For Wright, literature by and about African Americans needed to make the
racial injustices of the period the central focus of the text.
22. On Hurston’s Supporters
• In 1937, The New York Times Book Review immediately
praised the novel:
“From the first to last this is well-nigh a perfect story, but the
rest is simple and beautiful and shining with humor.”
• Novelist Alice Walker says that Hurston presents
“a sense of black people as complete, complex,
undiminished human beings, a sense that is
lacking in so much black writing and literature.”
• The late poet June Jordan called Their Eyes the
“most successful, convincing and exemplary
novel of blacklove that we have. Period.”
23. A Forgotten Text
Zora Neale Hurston
"A Genius of the South"
1901 - - - 1960
Novelist, Folklorist
Anthropologist
Tombstone erected by:
Alice Walker
Ms. magazine, 1973
24. Their Eyes Were Watching God
1937
Original cover in 1937 Cover in the 1980s
