New Black Studies Series

Literary Afro-Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Black Music

John Lowney

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780252099939
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Jazz emerged during the political and social upheaval of world war, communist revolution, Red Scares, and the Black Migration. The tumult bred disagreements about the cultural significance of jazz that concerned both its African American roots and its international appeal. The questions about what was new or even radical about the music initiated debates that writers recapitulated for decades.

Jazz Internationalism offers a bold reconsideration of jazz's influence in Afro-modernist literature. Ranging from the New Negro Renaissance through the social movements of the 1960s, John Lowney articulates nothing less than a new history of Afro-modernist jazz writing. Jazz added immeasurably to the vocabulary for discussing radical internationalism and black modernism in leftist African American literature. Lowney examines how Claude McKay, Ann Petry, Langston Hughes, and many other writers employed jazz as both a critical social discourse and mode of artistic expression to explore the possibilities—and challenges—of black internationalism. The result is an expansive understanding of jazz writing sure to spur new debates.

1“Harlem Jazzing”

Claude McKay, Home to Harlem, and Jazz Internationalism

Why did Occupation & Uplift come in? As a capitalistic empire, we needed surplus markets; and Haiti lay at our side entrance. Moreover, it fell within the allotted sphere of influence of the National City Bank of New York. The history of Haiti during the first quarter of the twentieth century is a footnote to the annals of that bank.

— Clement Wood, “The American Uplift in Haiti”

“Home to Harlem” … for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.

— W.E.B. Du Bois, “Two Novels: Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Claude McKay, Home to Harlem”

The June 1928 issue of The Crisis featured the second installment of Clement Wood’s exposé of United States policy in occupied Haiti. Wood, a white socialist poet who was perhaps best known for his 1926 jazz sequence titled Greenwich Village Blues, was uncompromising in his indictment of the financial motives underlying the occupation: “Once Americans were sensitive about taxation without representation. Now they force this upon a neighboring republic, at the dictate of affected American financial interests” (189). His article reflected a renewed African American interest in the brutal hypocrisy of an occupation that had already lasted more than a decade. After years of decreasing attention to Haiti, articles denouncing U.S. States policy had begun to reappear with greater frequency in journals such as The Nation, Opportunity, The Messenger, and The Crisis, anticipating the resurgence of widespread strikes and uprisings that would take place in Haiti the following year. So it is ironic that the same 1928 issue of The Crisis that criticized the United States’ imperial policy in Haiti also included what has become the most notorious book review of Claude McKay’s popular first novel, Home to Harlem. One would hardly suspect in reading this review by W.E.B. Du Bois that McKay’s fiction would have such an important impact on anti-imperialist black intellectuals in the Caribbean, West Africa, and Europe. Du Bois castigates McKay for catering to “that prurient demand on the part of white folk for a portrayal in Negroes of that utter licentiousness which conventional civilization holds white folk back from enjoying” (“Two Novels” 202). The scenes of “drunkenness, fighting, lascivious sexual promiscuity, and utter absence of restraint” that Du Bois criticizes are, of course, the cabaret, dance hall, and house party scenes that are most associated with jazz in the 1920s. Du Bois acknowledges, though, that McKay is “too great a poet” to write a book that is totally worthless. “The chief character, Jake,” he writes, “has something appealing, and the glimpses of the Haitian, Ray, have all the materials of a great piece of fiction” (202). Yet nothing more is said in this review about the Haitian intellectual whose narrative illustrates the destructive impact of an imperial policy that the same issue of The Crisis protests. Despite such renewed criticism of the United States’ occupation of Haiti in the later 1920s, the story of a Haitian migrant appears to have little place in a novel about Harlem.

Given Du Bois’s advocacy of Pan-Africanism during the 1920s, his exclusive attention to the African American context of Home to Harlem might seem surprising. His review of the novel, however, represented the response of many African American intellectuals, especially of his generation, who ignored McKay’s Haitian protagonist and instead questioned his motivation for a book that bore a disturbing resemblance to Carl Van Vechten’s controversial Nigger Heaven (1926).1 Until recently, most readers of Home to Harlem have followed its initial reception by Harlem Renaissance critics, concentrating on McKay’s primitivist portrayal of Jake, debating the racial politics of the novel’s gritty but romantic depiction of his Harlem “semi-underworld,” particularly the world of nightclubs and cabarets, where jazz figures so prominently.2 The first novel by a black writer to be so specifically identified with jazz, Home to Harlem provoked debates about black music and narrative form that continue to preoccupy scholars of jazz fiction. It is therefore important to consider the black internationalist framework of Home to Harlem and its sequel, Banjo. As Timothy Brennan has written, McKay was one of the few writers associated with the New Negro Renaissance who understood the importance of the Caribbean and Latin America for the development of early jazz. And perhaps more than any of his contemporaries in the United States, McKay understood the imperialist presumptions of defining jazz as the musical expression of American democratic values.3 The black internationalist implications of jazz are especially evident in Banjo, but McKay’s first novel enacts a more subtle critique of Western imperialist hegemony through its forms as well as its more explicit content. Why, then, did the jazz world of Harlem nightlife seem so disconnected from the African diasporic internationalism of Home to Harlem when the novel was first published? And why has the aporia in Du Bois’s review—between jazz and imperialism, between cultural politics and international relations—continued to inform the reception of Home to Harlem? One answer to these questions is that the novel’s structure separates the world of Harlem nightlife frequented by Jake in parts 1 and 3 from the intercultural dialogue between Jake and Ray in part 2. The realm of entertainment is separate from the realm of international politics; the distance between these realms seems as vast as the distance between the worldviews of Jake and Ray.

I will argue, however, that McKay’s representation of an international black Harlem is more politically complex than most accounts of him as a “Harlem Renaissance” writer have indicated, and the presumed mutual exclusivity of jazz and international politics is itself a problem that the novel reflexively accentuates.4 I will discuss specifically how McKay’s representation of African American music figures in the cross-cultural dynamic of Home to Harlem’s two migrant narratives. The first is Jake’s African American migrant narrative, which assumes a rural South–urban North geographical trajectory that is familiar to Harlem Renaissance fiction. Significantly, though, Jake’s narrative journey to Harlem begins not in his native Virginia but on a transatlantic freighter from London, shortly after he had left the U.S. Army in France, frustrated by the demeaning treatment of black soldiers who had enlisted to fight in the “white folks’ war” (McKay, Home to Harlem 8). Accompanying Jake’s travels is the sound of the blues and early jazz, and his itinerary recalls the history of jazz, with its origins in the African American South and its renewed international popularity, especially in France, in the aftermath of World War I. The second narrative is Ray’s African Caribbean migrant narrative, whose geography of exile evokes later postcolonialist narratives rather than U.S. immigrant narratives.

Home to Harlem represents the uneasy intersection of its two migrant narratives, celebrating the unlikely friendship between the African American working-class war deserter and the young Haitian intellectual who had fled from the U.S. military occupation of his country. Ray’s narrative of exile is structurally contained within Jake’s picaresque narrative, as it does not begin until the second part of the three-part novel, when we encounter him waiting tables in a railroad dining car where Jake is a cook. And his narrative concludes as abruptly as it begins, at the end of part 2, with his seemingly impulsive departure from Harlem aboard a European-bound freighter. Nonetheless, the friendship that evolves between Ray and Jake transforms both of them as they each confront the mutual prejudice—based on national and class differences—that makes their comradeship so unlikely. The incongruity of the novel’s two open-ended narratives represents less of a structural failure on McKay’s part, as has been argued by most critics of the novel, than a failure of his readers to conceptualize the political significance of its incongruity. In revealing how African diasporic divisions, particularly in Harlem, were based more on social prejudice than on competing national interests, McKay’s novel also suggests its American readers’ failure to relate these divisions to a hegemonic imperialist ideology. The Haitian nationality of the novel’s African Caribbean protagonist is thus especially important. While Haitians comprised a small minority of Caribbean immigrants to the United States, and Harlem specifically, McKay’s exposure of the devastating impact of the American invasion of Haiti underscored the necessity for a renewed counter-hegemonic black internationalist solidarity.

Jazz plays a significant role within the black transnationalist narrative imaginary of Home to Harlem. Critics who have discussed the significance of black music in McKay’s fiction associate jazz with his critique of dominant Western values, whether that critique is predominantly Marxist, Pan-Africanist, cosmopolitan, or queer.5 While jazz is more overtly identified with black internationalism in Banjo, I will emphasize how Home to Harlem enacts the utopian potential of jazz as an intercultural mode of expression. However, the question of what jazz signifies in Home to Harlem is complicated by the novel’s time frame; although the novel was written during the ascent of jazz as a mass cultural phenomenon in the mid-1920s, it represents the earlier postwar period in which the definition of jazz itself was uncertain. Jazz is associated with the blues, ragtime, and other forms of popular music in Home to Harlem, and its aesthetic hybridity raises social questions that preoccupied African American critics throughout the 1920s. Was jazz distinctively African American, given its identification with black musicians but also its wider popularity in the United States and Europe, not to mention the influence of Latin American and Caribbean music on its impact? How was the popularity of jazz a source of pride for African Americans? Conversely, how did jazz reinforce racist stereotypes associated with the tradition of minstrelsy in the United States? How was jazz a mode of mass culture, of folk culture, or of high culture? To what extent should jazz be identified with modernity or with its roots in African modes of performance? As jazz historian Eric Porter has written, by the 1920s jazz had become increasingly recognized as a form of “syncopated, instrumental dance music,” but it had also become “a business enterprise and a set of institutional relationships, a focal point for political and social debate, a vehicle for individual and communal identity formation, and, eventually, an idea” (6). Home to Harlem explores these multiple dimensions of jazz, and its international framework for understanding black music complicates as it elucidates the social significance of musical improvisation.

Part 1: Harlem

Claude McKay’s 1937 autobiography, A Long Way from Home, begins with a return trip “to the city that was home,” New York, and goes on to tell the tale of a vagabond, but a “vagabond with a purpose … determined to find expression in writing” (4). It’s fair to say that McKay’s reputation has since traveled a long way from “a long way from home.” Whether his literary “home” is identified with Jamaica or Harlem depends on the critical geographies in which he has been located, whether Caribbean or African American, postcolonial or post-Americanist. Indeed, the concept of “home” has become as complicated as the legend of the “troubadour wanderer” that McKay cultivated. Understandings of McKay in the twenty-first century have been transformed especially by Marxist studies, African diaspora studies, and queer studies, by critics such as Kate Baldwin, Brent Hayes Edwards, Gary Holcomb, William Maxwell, and Michelle Stephens, all of whom have challenged the disciplinary parameters of modernist and Harlem Renaissance studies.6 Thus, it is interesting that McKay’s fiction is not routinely associated with African American popular music, even though Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929) are among the earliest novels to feature jazz performance settings as transformative social sites.7 Both of these novels relate the figure of the radical black literary intellectual to jazz performance, and although they have been celebrated as prototypical explorations of black internationalism, McKay’s literary representations of jazz and the blues have most often been characterized as “primitivist” rather than “modernist.” As I will suggest, Home to Harlem is an especially appropriate place to examine McKay’s response not only to the contested reception of jazz in the 1920s but also to the international significance of jazz as an Afro-modernist form of expression.

As McKay’s biographers have noted, there are elements of the author in both protagonists of Home to Harlem.8 Like Jake, McKay had experienced the exhausting work and intense nightlife of migrant laborers living in Harlem, and like Ray, he was disaffected with African American intellectual life and American society more generally. However, given McKay’s insistent critique of American and European imperialism throughout his career, it is surprising how few readers have addressed the significance of Ray’s nationality to McKay’s Harlem novel. Ray reappears as a protagonist of McKay’s second novel, Banjo, which revisits the young writer’s quest for literary expression in Marseilles, amid the vibrantly international milieu of African, Caribbean, and North American black workers. Whereas Home to Harlem is usually cited as a flawed but important novel of the Harlem Renaissance, Banjo is credited as one of the founding texts of the Pan-Africanist négritude movement, which was also inspired by Haitian nationalist response to American imperialism. If McKay is best known in the United States as the protest poet who wrote “If We Must Die” and other poems of black pride and resistance after World War I, his international reputation rests more on the impact of his prose fiction on postcolonial Caribbean and West African writers such as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor.9 This bifurcated reception of McKay’s writing exemplifies the central problem that Paul Gilroy investigates in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness: “the fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the concept of culture and the affinities and affiliations which link the blacks of the West to one of their adoptive, parental cultures” (2). The alternative concept of a transnational, intercultural “black Atlantic” is, of course, especially appropriate for a writer like McKay, who spent much of his life quite literally as well as intellectually traversing the Atlantic, just as it is appropriate for the study of events, such as the Haitian Revolution, or movements, such as Garveyism, Pan-Africanism, or négritude, that have had global implications.10

In his response to critics of his fiction, particularly Home to Harlem, McKay himself underscores the significance of his cross-cultural experience. For example, in a retrospective essay titled “A Negro Writer to His Critics” (1932), he emphasizes the continuity of his earlier Jamaican dialect verse with his novelistic representation of African American working-class speech. In doing so he asserts his own literary cosmopolitanism while questioning the narrow provincialism of his African American critics: “If my brethren had taken the trouble to look a little into my obscure life they would have discovered that years before I had recaptured the spirit of the Jamaican peasants in verse, rendering their primitive joys, their loves and hates, their work and play, their dialect. And what I did in prose for Harlem was very similar to what I had done for Jamaica in verse” (135). Writing from the experience of having lived for many years in Europe and North Africa after he had lived in Jamaica and the United States, McKay suggests that his internationalist perspective was especially attuned to the multiracial development of American urban centers. His conclusion to “A Negro Writer and His Critics” is especially appropriate for understanding the importance of the cross-cultural camaraderie of characters like Jake and Ray in Home to Harlem: “The time when a writer will stick only to the safe old ground of his own class of people is undoubtedly passing. Especially in America, where all the peoples of the world are scrambling side by side and modern machines and the ramifications of international commerce are steadily breaking down the ethnological barriers that separate the peoples of the world” (139).

More recently, comparative cultural and literary studies of American modernism have been “steadily breaking down the ethnological barriers” that have defined the parameters of the Harlem Renaissance, arguing that its formation was more intercultural—and more international—than its most influential historians have suggested. By the turn of the century, influential studies began to appear, such as George Hutchinson’s interracial formulation of “the Harlem Renaissance in black and white,” Ann Douglass’s extensive overview of 1920s “mongrel Manhattan,” Michael North’s comparative analysis of “the dialect of modernism,” and Michael Denning’s panoramic account of “the laboring of American culture,” all of which underscore the interrelations of African American and immigrant cultural forms within the United States.11 Perhaps the most significant commonality was the rhetorical appeal to cultural pluralism that characterizes African American and immigrant American cultural nationalisms. Liberal proponents of African American cultural nationalism emphasized Harlem’s multinational dimension, affirming a model of cultural pluralism that paralleled immigrant claims for a “trans-national” American culture.12 Such a model of cultural pluralism is most familiarly found in The New Negro anthology, which, despite its limited coverage of the Garvey mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 “Harlem Jazzing”: Claude McKay, Home to Harlem, and Jazz Internationalism
• 2 “Black Man’s Verse”: The Black Chicago Renaissance and the Popular Front Jazz Poetics of Frank Marshall Davis
• 3 “Do You Sing for a Living?”: Ann Petry, The Street, and the Gender Politics of World War II Jazz
• 4 “Cultural Exchange”: Cold War Jazz and the Political Aesthetics of Langston Hughes’s Long Poems
• 5 “A Silent Beat in Between the Drums”: Bebop, Post-Bop, and the Black Beat Poetics of Bob Kaufman
• Conclusion “A New Kind of Music”: Paule Marshall, The Fisher King, and the Dissonance of Diaspora
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index