Queer African American male identity in Claude Mckay's romance in Marselille.

Abstract

In trying to categorize McKay's literary identity, old approaches to his work have oversimplified the meaning of his artistic achievement. In the context of the broader process of recovering and reevaluating the literary production of the Harlem Renaissance and of the cultural stage of the 1930s, modem criticism has proposed a more comprehensive theoretical framework, based on the emergence in recent years of queer theory, which challenges all forms of power and hierarchy at work in the society. McKay's novels emphasize the importance of the Harlem Renaissance in the occurrence and the evolution of queerness as a form of manifestation of African American male identity. McKay presents the image of the highly sexualized black body and the socially unconventional habits of homosexuality, even if mostly encoded, in relation to labor and black bohemian proletarianism. Romance in Marseille, still in manuscript, is a literary and social document of the black proletarian diaspora. In this novel, for the first time in his work, McKay clearly refers to a homosexual relationship. The queer proletariat in Quayside expresses its views freely on the background of the open multicultural life that is developing in Marseilles. The lumpenproletariat gains in McKay's perspective the power and the means to bring about the desired social change, and one of the most radical and efficient steps in this sense is the sexual revolution.