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Black Masculinities As Marronage: Claude Mckay's Representation of Black Male Subjectivities in Metropolitan Spaces

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Black Masculinities As Marronage: Claude Mckay's Representation of Black Male Subjectivities in Metropolitan Spaces W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 2011 Black Masculinities as Marronage: Claude McKay's Representation of Black Male Subjectivities in Metropolitan Spaces Jarrett Hugh Brown College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the American Studies Commons, and the Caribbean Languages and Societies Commons Recommended Citation Brown, Jarrett Hugh, "Black Masculinities as Marronage: Claude McKay's Representation of Black Male Subjectivities in Metropolitan Spaces" (2011). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539623576. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-shen-wn74 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Black Masculinities as Marronage: Claude McKay's Representations of Black Male Subjectivities in Metropolitan Spaces Jarrett Hugh Brown Effort District, Clarendon, Jamaica W.I. M.A. Clark University, 1999 B.A. University ofthe West Indies Mona Campus, 1997 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the College of William and Mary in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy American Studies Program The College of William and Mary January 2011 APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy ~own Approved by the Committee, December 2010 ~ Howard University © 2010, Jarrett Hugh Brown All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT PAGE This dissertation explores the representation of black masculinities in Claude McKay's novels, Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929) and Banana Bottom (1933). I use the trope of marronage to theorize McKay's representations of black male subjectivities across a range of African diasporan spaces in the Caribbean, the USA and Europe, arguing that McKay's male characters negotiate these diasporan spaces with the complex consciousness and proclivities of maroons. I then examine the ways in which careful attention to the migration and settlement in various diasporan spaces of McKay's black male characters exposes some critical manifestations that profoundly alter how we think about the formation of black male subjectivities. McKay's representations predate by more than sixty years the present currency of difference, hybridity and multiplicity in postmodernist and postcolonial discourse, yet almost throughout the entire 20th century his work was not recognized in this context either in the USA or the Caribbean, both places where he has some degree of iconic stature. In fact, the maroon consciousness of McKay's men produces new insights on the issues of cosmopolitanism, race, nation, and migration in terms of how these affect black male subjectivity but more so how black male subjectivities work upon these concepts to expand their definitions and produce particular kinds of diasporan masculinity. Through the trope of marronage, the project will demonstrate how McKay's male characters use their maroon conditions to map, explore and define a black diasporan experience - one, moreover, that is shaped by "creolizations"- the various pushes and pulls of multiple forms of psychological and cultural crossover. The Introduction places marronage in its historical and cultural contexts and defines who the Maroons were and what particular characteristics managed their existence. The trope of marronage, as an organizing frame for McKay's texts, is intricately tied to the understanding of how "creolization," a term that is integrally associated with the Caribbean experience of hybridity, as both an experience and a concept, structures McKay's sensibility and representations. Marronage and creolization are integral in understanding the range of black male subjectivities that performed under the umbrella of class, race, nation and gender, even as those same performances were producing, underground as it were, "other" narratives about black identity and migration during the 1920s-30s, the period in which McKay wrote. Furthermore, the term "subjectivities" rather than "identity" or the singular form, "subjectivity" merges so as to give texture and form to the ambiguities that abound in McKay's representation of the individual and collective experience of the characters in his novels. Chapter One offers an interpretation of Home to Harlem as a narrative in which black masculinity is as much a subjectivity driven by the search for home as it is itinerancy. Chapter Two seeks to analyze McKay's Banjo or a Story without a Plot, through an examination of the protagonist Banjo, to see how his migrant or vagabond characters live as cosmopolites in Marseilles' metissage inclined port city. Finally, Chapter Three proposes to examine how Banana Bottom's Bita Plant represents a "masked" McKay, or McKay in drag, looking critically at a colonial Jamaica that restricted her/him with certain conservative ideas but which still appeals to McKay artistically because of its rich pastoral sensibilities. Table of Contents Dedication 11 Acknowledgments 11l Introduction An Examination of Marronage 1 Chapter One Tightrope Walking: Negotiating Masculine Subjectivities 31 in Home To Harlem Chapter Two Cosmopolitanism as Marronage in Claude McKay's Banjo 88 or a Story without a Plot Chapter Three "Weh eye nuh see heart nuh leap": Claude McKay's 147 Literary Drag Performance in Banana Bottom. Conclusion 182 Bibliography 194 Curriculum Vita 207 DEDICATION I dedicate this dissertation to my mother who fathered me. It is also for my grandmother and all the women whose masculinity and femininity have shaped me. 11 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS During the process of writing this dissertation my father and one of my inspirations, Barry Chevannes, would say to me, "If yuh want good, yuh nose haffi run." This popular Jamaican proverb describes the demands on one's life that can come from an attempt to accomplish or achieve an ambitious goal. My dad's words were a constant reminder that taking risks, intellectual or other, and seeking to triumph over the many challenges that a project like this one presents, might have discomforts that I must endure respectfully. In fact, these are the words that led me to make difficult decisions to travel away from the College of William and Mary, first to Pennsylvania and then to cold, cold Maine to pursue ways to sustain this "good." Needless to say, I always had a "running nose." I am therefore grateful to those family, friends, and mentors who nurtured this "good." Bowdoin College awarded me a Dissertation Fellowship to complete this project and it was while here that the bulk of this dissertation took shape and developed into a confident thesis. The College's funding made it possible for me to gain access to McKay's papers archived in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. I am also grateful to those colleagues in the English Department at Bowdoin College, Mary Agnes, Elizabeth Muther, and David Collings especially, who took the time to mentor, read, edit and discuss different unrefined parts of this project. David Collings went out of his way to read McKay's novels, discuss them with me and ultimately tease out some refreshing and productive theoretical grounds for analyzing McKay's fiction using the conceptual frames of masculinity and marronage to analyze McKay's texts. To my brother and friend, Olufemi Vaughan, Director of the Africana Studies Program, Bowdoin College, lll whose Political Science background pushed me to think more "ambidextrously" about my conclusions about the African Diaspora, masculinity and marronage, especially during the interwar period. I am also indebted Jean-Max Guieu, Department of French, Georgetown University, for the invaluable resources he provided on the material culture and social history of Marseille. I am thankful for his translations of McKay's Banjo and other secondary material from French and for his unwavering support and friendship through out this journey. I am immensely grateful to Drs. Michael Bucknor, Department of Literatures in English, the University of the West Indies, Mona campus and Curdella Forbes, English Department, Howard University, Washington D.C. Their belief in this project from its very inception gave me the strength to survive away from William and Mary. Their mentoring demanded an intellectual rigor and suppleness that did "my nose run" and kept this "good" in my sights. To the late Professor Rex Nettleford, for his letters from the Diaspora and for any clippings on Caribbean masculinity. I am blessed to have had his love and support. Thanks to my Director Lynn Weiss for her patience and dedication in dealing with a "maroon-like." I could not have achieved this "good" without her generosity of spirit and commitment. Thanks to my dissertation buddy and friend, Ray Black for the companionship and for sharing your beautiful daughter's smiles at all hours of the night or day. Thanks to my family and friends, those here and those in Jamaica for bolstering my courage to keep working for this "good." I am blessed to have friends in you Jane and Sam Nesbitt, Joseph DeLois, Annette Leyow, Coleridge Barnett, Ella Diaz and Mark D' Alessandro. lV 1 Introduction : An Examination of Marronage My dissertation examines the representation of male characters in Claude McKay's novels, Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929) and Banana Bottom (1933). I use the trope of marronage to theorize McKay's representation of black male subjectivities across a range of African diasporan spaces in the Caribbean, the USA and Europe, arguing that McKay's male characters negotiate these diasporan spaces with the complex consciousness and proclivities of maroons. By employing the trope of marronage, I examine the ways in which careful attention to the migration and settlement in various diasporan spaces of McKay's black male characters exposes some critical manifestations that profoundly alter how we think about the formation of black male subjectivities.
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