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Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik

byWinston James

Winston James reconstructs Claude McKay's political formation before and during his emergence as a major Caribbean writer, Harlem Renaissance figure, and Black radical. Colonial Jamaica, migration, labor, race, class, and global revolution shaped McKay's poetry and prose as well as his attraction to Bolshevism. The biography follows networks connecting the Caribbean, United States, Europe, and Russia, placing literary creativity within anticolonial struggle. James shows how McKay developed a distinctive Black internationalism that embraced revolutionary possibility while resisting efforts by movements and institutions to contain his independent voice.

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Publication date

2021

Format

Print edition

Pages

384

ISBN

9780231135931