Transhistoricizing Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille

Description

Claude McKay’s abandoned novel Romance in Marseille (circa 1929–1933), first published by Penguin Classics in February 2020, has been praised as a new-old text that transcends historical boundaries, resonating with both the present moment and the hundred-year-old era of the New Negro. This special issue offers the first-ever collection of academic essays on this novel, which arrived as an instant classic: both a benchmark of the Harlem Renaissance and a fresh statement that could have been written for twenty-first-century readers. Using McKay’s Romance as a critical compass point, the authors map new directions and historical territories in Black modernism, queer theory, disability studies, Marxist/materialist thought, and other established and emerging areas.
 
Contributors
Stephanie J. Brown, Nissa Ren Cannon, Zainab Cheema, Rich Cole, Michael J. Collins, David B. Hobbs, Gary Edward Holcomb, William J. Maxwell, Eric H. Newman, Laura Ryan, Jesse W. Schwartz, Agnieszka Tuszynska, Laura Winkiel Gary Edward Holcomb is Professor of African American Literature and Studies at Ohio University and the author of Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance. William J. Maxwell is Professor of English and African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis and the author, most recently, of F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature.

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