A Deferred Meaning of Home in Claude McKay’s Novel Home to Harlem

Taking a title of his first novel Home to Harlem (1928), Claude McKay as the implied author seems to bring the perception of his readers to a standpoint saying that Harlem was a final destination for blacks in the early 20th century, the time setting of the novel. Paradoxically, the novel gives a twisted ending by letting both of the main black characters in the novel, Jake and Ray, leave Harlem because of different reasons. This article aims to show a deferred meaning of “Home to Harlem” in the novel as well as to find the hidden aim in the novel. This research will use Derrida’s theory about deconstruction and differance concept. The result shows that the text seems to deconstruct a myth about Harlem as the mecca of the New Negro. The meaning of home in the novel has deferred into a space inhabited by a familiar in which one can find needs of physical, intellectual, mental, and emotional security. A decision to leave Harlem chosen by both of main characters in the novel is a symbol that Harlem cannot be the best representative of African American’s home enabling to meet all of blacks’ needs of racial equality in the early twentieth century.