Transhistoricizing Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille

Abstract

Contexts: Gary Edward Holcomb In February 2020 Penguin Classics published the Harlem Renaissance author Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille, a novel that had idled in an archive for nearly ninety years.1We believe that the debut of this work of fiction, until recently effectively unknown, may stimulate several critical areas, not only Harlem Renaissance studies but also dialogues across queer, disability, feminist, Marxist, postcolonial, Afro-Orientalist, Black Atlantic, and transatlantic modernist scholarship. As we hope the reader of this special issue will see, McKay’s circa 1929–33 text also offers a fecund analytic subject to critics working in Afropessimisim, primitivism, reparations, and surveillance, as well as such emergent approaches as maritime modernism and the politics of pleasure. As Romance in Marseille is a good candidate for an analysis that is not necessarily obliged to a strictly historicist approach, our call for papers welcomed scholarship that explored how McKay’s recovered novel offers transhistorical ways of seeing. The novel’s near-century-long absence, synthesized with its pertinence to current critical concerns, speaks volumes to a range of past and present moments. Themedia reception of Romance inMarseille proved to be a popular analogue to our interest in welcoming transhistorical readings. Feted for its ability to speak with clarity to the present, not least in its depiction of the persistent crisis of Black bodies under siege, Romance in Marseille has shown a considerable suppleness for being read as both an artifact of its historical moment and a work of fiction that acutely resonates with present reading communities. We first learned of McKay’s novel through reading Wayne F. Cooper’s indispensable 1987 biography, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner of the Harlem Renaissance, a text that glosses the obstacles McKay faced while trying to publish it.2 But Romance in Marseille’s adversities ranged even beyond the death of the all-but-forgotten fiftyeight-year-old author in 1948. The final hurdle took the form of theMcKay Literary Estate being compelled to prevent a UK university press from publishing the novel, a wrangle that seemed doomed to drag on indefinitely. Over the years, we would