ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES最新文献

{"title":"A Queer Romance","authors":"Eric Newman","doi":"10.1215/00138282-8814983","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-8814983","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay argues that the queer romances at the margins of Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille operate as sites of possibility for a happy, egalitarian social relation that is longed for but not otherwise accessible in the novel. The essay contends that this novel, read against Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929), offers one of the most sustained, nuanced representations of queer life in McKay’s archive and in early twentieth-century LGBT literature more generally, one in which same-sex-oriented characters are rendered as normal, integral figures in urban life rather than as outré characters whose primary function is to add spice to the narrative. As the novel demonstrates the continuing appeal of queerness as a site for imagining a more liberated, loving form of social organization—one that relishes the pleasure-in-difference that is a hallmark of McKay’s writing—it also anticipates formations within the queer liberationist politics of the decades that followed.","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":"59 1","pages":"58-72"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46332029","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“No Man’s Ocean Ever Did Get the Best of Me”","authors":"N. Cannon","doi":"10.1215/00138282-8815027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-8815027","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 By the late 1920s steam travel was faster, more comfortable, and more affordable than ever before, and there were more shipping lines, operating more ships, than in the past. The major lines could not compete with one another in terms of cost or speed, so they wooed customers by focusing on passenger comfort, attempting to one-up each other’s luxury. It is in this context that Claude McKay wrote a novel about an African seaman who makes two miserable passages across the Atlantic—the first as a stowaway, the second in first class. This article reads McKay’s novel as a revision of the narrative of liberating and luxurious ocean travel promoted by the shipping lines and argues that Romance in Marseille offers novel possibilities and implications for maritime and oceanic studies because it asks readers to recognize overlaps between different forms of mobility and, in characteristic McKay fashion, to resist reductive interpretation.","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":"59 1","pages":"133-145"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45101462","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Shoreline Thinking","authors":"Laura A. Winkiel","doi":"10.1215/00138282-8815038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-8815038","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the relation between the dockside denizens of Claude McKay’s Marseille and the violent history of slavery and racism. It takes a longue durée approach to modernism by arguing that the previous five hundred years of colonization and conquest of Black and Indigenous life continue to constrain the possibilities of freedom imagined in the art and literature of the early twentieth century. Using Édouard Glissant’s poetics of relation, it considers how the shoreline in Romance in Marseille provides a fecund location for sifting through the residues of slavery to salvage possibilities for living otherwise than the racist state demands. In so doing, Romance in Marseille goes further than McKay’s other novels in asserting that Black femininity must be central to a Black reinvention of the human.","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":"59 1","pages":"146-165"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44550925","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“A Little Civilization in My Pocket”","authors":"L. Ryan","doi":"10.1215/00138282-8814994","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-8814994","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article argues that Romance in Marseille marks a significant shift in Claude McKay’s approach to primitivism, one that necessitates a reconsideration of his reputation—based on his two novels of the late 1920s—as perhaps the Harlem Renaissance’s foremost proponent of “strategic primitivism.” Tracing the development of McKay’s primitivism from Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929) to his most recently published novel, this essay suggests an evolution along philosophical, political, and stylistic lines. Romance in Marseille deconstructs the primitive/civilized binary, forgoing the antiracist potentialities of primitivism for the utopian possibilities of international Marxism, interracial collaboration and queer love.","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":"59 1","pages":"73-92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45052758","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Silence and Violence in the Archive of Slavery","authors":"Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy","doi":"10.1215/00138282-8815104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-8815104","url":null,"abstract":"I n his classic text, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, MichelRolph Trouillot asked of the Haitian Revolution: “Howdoes one write a history of the impossible?”1 Planters and colonial powers represented the thirteen-year event that resulted in the enslaved overthrow of colonial power and the independent state of Haiti (the first black republic of the Atlantic World) as an “unthinkable history,” “a non-event,” even as it was happening. Although Trouillot wrote specifically of Haiti, his work on how social and political inequalities of the past shape the ways historical events are recorded in their moment and then archived, retrieved, and written about in the present is widely applicable to historians of slavery. The archive of slavery is steeped in silences. This is true especially for the colonial Caribbean, where enslaved individuals left few if any sources of their own and often appear in the archives as voiceless and fleeting figures. In this way, to write a history that recognizes the complex personhood of the enslaved, while adhering to traditional disciplinary methodologies, appears to be nearly impossible. How do historians of slavery, facedwith a disruptive, fragmented, and contested archive, recreate the lifeworlds of enslaved individuals who appear as fleeting moments in the archives?2 How do we engage with an archive and a discipline very much tied to imperialism and colonial violence? How do historians make space for a cultural and social history of the enslaved while recognizing the condition of slavery, which betokens alienation, abjection, and social death? While Trouillot acknowledged that “history is the fruit of power,” it is for this reason that wemust study its production: “Power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous.” Indeed, Trouillot argued that “the ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.”3 The three articles under consideration here reveal the fraught relationship historians have with the archive of slavery and the ways in which we might address the silences that abound in it. One of the fundamental challenges historians of slavery face is how to exhume the lives of the enslaved from the archive of slavery. Saidiya Hartman begins “The Dead Book Revisited” by asking: “Howdowe attend to black death? Howdowe find life where only traces of destructions remain?”4 Reflecting on two of her previous","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":"59 1","pages":"222 - 224"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48862823","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Broken Bits of Color in the Dirt”","authors":"Jesse W. Schwartz","doi":"10.1215/00138282-8814961","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-8814961","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay examines the numerous critical claims of “timeliness” around the recently recovered novel Romance in Marseille as well as Claude McKay’s own numerous commitments and challenges as they emerge therein: the multiple and enduring afterlives of slavery, the Bolshevik Revolution and the burgeoning of its stiflingly bureaucratic Thermidor under Stalin, the various theoretical and programmatic complications that issues of race and gender posed for international socialism alongside the promises and disappointments of emancipatory politics writ large. However, in attempting to adjudicate such problematics of difference, McKay also provides the outlines of a dialectical “Black Intersectional International,” thereby gesturing toward a “commonism” of the quayside.","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":"59 1","pages":"12-37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42888585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Slavery's Archive and the Matter of Black Atlantic Lives","authors":"Marisa J. Fuentes","doi":"10.1215/00138282-8815140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-8815140","url":null,"abstract":"H ow do we redress the ongoing violence of slavery’s archive and its effects on our present? Thinking with three recent articles that address the history of slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic world, the following short reflection considers different approaches to contextualizing Black lives in the past and present.1 Two of the three articles, by Stephanie E. Smallwood and Saidiya Hartman, critically engage Hartman’s 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts.”2 The third article, Simon P. Newman’s “Freedom-Seeking Slaves in England and Scotland, 1700– 1780,” explores hundreds of eighteenth-century newspaper advertisements for runaway enslaved (and “servant”) men and women in England and Scotland. For vastly different audiences and to different ends, Hartman, Smallwood, and Newman contend with the erasures of enslaved people from the archives and national or imperial historiographies. Seemingly disconnected by geographies, methods, and fields, these articles, brought together in conversation, invite us to consider the state of historical research on Black lives and how to approach their erasure in the field of history. In the wake of her previous work and a summer of intense police brutality, Hartman writes about the stakes of engaging slavery’s archive in the enduring context of Black death, the seemingly unchanged patterns of anti-Black violence, and how wemust make room for the ways in which Black people live, mourn, and steal away to grieve in themidst of this ongoing terror.3 Smallwood, in revisiting “Venus in TwoActs,” reassesses her ownbook, Saltwater Slavery, to demonstrate themethod of exploring the “counter-factual”—what is in the archive but is denied—as the starting point to writing histories of slavery (or the slave trade). Smallwood also offers us an incredibly thorough historiography of the uses of slavery’s archive from the early twentieth century—when the planter’s perspective prevailed in authority and objectivity—to the 1970s, when social historians shifted their method to “bottom up” by using an “abundance” of archival material to tell the enslaved story. What Smallwood points out, important to us for this short reflection, is the move to quantitative methods—the counting and tallying and charting of bodies, demographics, and geographies that gavehistorians “evidence” that enslavedpeople shaped","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":"59 1","pages":"229 - 231"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47489376","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Lyric Commodification in McKay's Morocco","authors":"David B. Hobbs","doi":"10.1215/00138282-8815060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-8815060","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Reassessing Claude McKay's writing about North Africa, this article contends that McKay saw sites in this region as uniquely felicitous to staging conversations between global socialism and the Black diasporic avant-garde. His attention to site-specific interracial urban cultures serves as a counterpoint to the Depression-fueled Pan-Africanism that increasingly defined W. E. B. Du Bois's editorials for the Crisis. At the same time, McKay's persistent interest in the activities of the Liberator suggests a surprising resonance between their aesthetics to his locodescriptive verse. Bringing these strands together, the article finds that McKay did not seek a synesthetic resolution to the question of organizing an urban community or an integrationist racial future but, rather, sought to highlight the importance of dissensus despite global uncertainty. The article considers McKay's formal poetics and fiction together, comparing his visual tactics with the French and British Colonial Expositions' \"panoramas.\"","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":"59 1","pages":"181 - 200"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45754001","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Afropessimism, Liminal Hotspots, and Claude McKay's Aesthetic of Sovereign Rejection in Romance in Marseille","authors":"M. Collins","doi":"10.1215/00138282-8815071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-8815071","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article considers Claude McKay's Romance in Marseille through two emerging fields of study: \"Afropessimism\" and anthropological theories of the \"liminal hotspot.\" It suggests that McKay's novel functions as a critique of positive Harlem Renaissance images of diasporic movement by highlighting how racial \"Blackness\" functions as a system for rejecting people of color from the benefits of modernity and sovereign rights-bearing status in an expanded temporal and spatial frame. To explore this hypothesis, the article turns to new anthropological work on the liminal hotspot as a site of sustained, unresolved transition, reading the affectivity of diaspora as a negative one in McKay's work that places an unsustainable pressure on ritual and performative stylizations and renders them untenable as forms for cultivating a sovereign condition.","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":"59 1","pages":"201 - 217"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49372869","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“A Syrup of Passion and Desire”","authors":"A. Tuszyńska","doi":"10.1215/00138282-8814972","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-8814972","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines the politics of transgressive pleasure and desire in Claude McKay’s novel Romance in Marseille, as a response to what Achille Mbembe, departing from Foucault’s notion of biopower, has termed necropolitics. In the novel, the interlocking hegemonic systems of racism and capitalism function as mechanisms of necropower—the power of determining whose lives are deemed worthy and whose bodies are deemed disposable—which is executed through the procedures of mutilation, surveillance, poverty, and sexual exploitation. Foregrounding the titular “romance,” McKay’s novel features characters who engage in romantic and sexual relationships that subvert the expectations of heteronormativity, sexual economy, and the color line. Anticipating the twenty-first-century theories that locate sovereign power in the body, McKay politicizes and radicalizes desire as a response to the racialization, criminalization, and dehumanization of his novel’s lumpen characters.","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":"59 1","pages":"38-57"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43891143","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}