The Harlem Renaissance as postcolonial phenomenon.

"Wonder why he chose an American college? Most of the chiefs' sons'll go to Oxford or bust. I know--this fellow is probably from Liberia or thereabouts. American influence--see?"--Rudolph Fisher, The Conjure Man Dies

The Harlem Renaissance--as American as Florence Mills in Shuffle Along, Langston Hughes composing "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" while crossing the Mississippi on a train, Zora Neale Hurston collecting Black folklore for Franz Boas. And yet the road version of Shuffle Along also hosted chorine Josephine Baker, who scored international stardom as a headliner for the Paris Folies Bergere; Hurston followed her first successful reworking of African American folklore in Mules and Men (1935) with Tell My Horse (1938), an examination of the practice of voodoo in Haiti; and Hughes's poem grounds itself specifically in a diasporic consciousness that embraces the Euphrates, the Congo, and the Nile as rivers of Black geography. On the home front, the biography and career of Casper Holstein, an immigrant from the former Danish Virgin Islands, then ruled by the US Navy, illustrates just how seminal was the West Indian presence in the Harlem of the 1920s. Holstein, a former porter, invented and enriched himself through the numbers racket; yet as historian David Levering Lewis points out, he used a portion of his wealth not only to promote the Harlem Renaissance but to make the linkage between American racism at home and its export to its unacknowledged empire. "Invited by his young friend Walrond to use [the National Urban League's journal] Opportunity as a sounding board for conditions in the Virgin Islands, Holstein wrote a detailed, carefully argued article for the October 1925 issue. From then on, the Opportunity network had a generous friend.... Holstein's gift of a thousand dollars made the 1926 awards possible" (When Harlem Was In Vogue 130). (1)

In Alain Locke's groundbreaking anthology The New Negro (1925), which announced the arrival of the Harlem Renaissance on the literary scene, the Caribbean presence is evident. Prominently featured were poems by the Jamaican immigrant Claude McKay, and a short story titled "The Palm Porch," by the West Indian writer Eric Walrond. Essays were contributed by Puerto Rican bibliophile Arthur Schomburg ("The Negro Digs Up His Past"), and by the Jamaican-born journalists Joel A. Rogers ("Jazz at Home") and Wilfrid A. Domingo. Domingo's "Gift of the Black Tropics" not only claims McKay as a Jamaican poet but explicitly states, "It is probably not realized, indeed, to what extent West Indian Negroes have contributed to the wealth, power and prestige of the United States" (344).

The literary contributions of these Caribbean Blacks reflected the demographics of Harlem, where almost 25 percent of the Black populace came from outside the United States (Osofsky 131). This presence often resulted in intraethnic tensions. American Blacks often applied the insult "monkeychaser" to residents of West Indian origin--but many West Indians made their presence felt in the left-wing and radical movements of Harlem's political scene. (2) Journalists and activists of West Indian origin, including Cyril Briggs, Richard B. Moore, Hubert Harrison, and Amy Jacques Garvey, played prominent roles in the United Negro Improvement Association, the Socialist Speakers Bureau, the Peoples Education Forum, and the African Blood Brotherhood, an early nationalist organization founded by Briggs that eventually allied itself to the Communist Party. Domingo explains that, coming from countries in which Blacks had experienced no legalized segregation and limitations upon opportunity, West Indians were better prepared to challenge racial barriers in the United States than the more docile American Blacks: "Skilled at various trades and having a contempt for body service and menial work, many of the immigrants apply for positions that the average American Negro has been schooled to regard as restricted to white men only, with the result that through their persistence and doggedness in fighting white labor, West Indians have in many cases been pioneers and shock troops to open a way for Negroes into new fields of employment" (344-45).

The West Indian presence in Harlem made itself felt not only in radical and literary circles, it brought to African American intellectual thought a postcolonial perspective that shaped the ideology of the Harlem Renaissance in fundamental ways. McKay and Walrond were formed by a colonial history and education against which they struggled but within which they found themselves ultimately entangled. This struggle bore obvious analogies to the effort of many African American writers to distance themselves from a racist American discourse, but the colonial world provided, by definition, an international perspective and a geographically distanced locus of the ruling discourse. Given the time period, the great colonial empires were alive and well, but the intellectual seeds were already being sown for their eventual dismantling. The postcolonial attitudes of McKay, Walrond, and Holstein lay in their rejection of the imperial worldview that always put Caribbean and African Blacks under the indefinite--and presumably benign--tutelage of the white races.

The Harlem Renaissance developed postcolonial discourse in three ways: (1) it provided a publishing platform for writing about life in territories under imperial rule; (2) it extended postcolonial modes of thought and resistance into an American intellectual and political context; and (3) it provided a model and inspiration for subsequent postcolonial ideologies. When speaking of the Harlem Renaissance and its influence as a postcolonial phenomenon, we must distinguish between the modes of thought and culture developed in three different empires--the British, the French, and the American.

The British Empire cast the deepest shadow on the Harlem Renaissance's literary scene. McKay's militant sonnets electrified the American left and the Black intelligentsia; while Walrond's collection of expressionistic short stories, Tropic Death (1926), garnered critical acclaim. Although McKay and Walrond wrote American material with American settings, much of their writing reflected and analyzed conditions in their British colonies of origin, Jamaica in the case of McKay, and for Walrond, British Guiana and Barbados. In the context of their American-based literary careers, McKay and Walrond were given a platform from which they published Commonwealth Literature.

McKay made his first literary reputation in Jamaica with the appearance of two locally published books of poetry, but at that time, having been educated in colonial schools and mentored by an Englishman, Walter Jekyll, he was still and unproblematically a poet of the British Empire. Later in the 1920s and 30s, when New York-based Harper & Brothers supported his publishing career, several stories in his collection Gingertown (1932) and his third novel Banana Bottom (1933) were situated in Jamaica without obvious American overlay. One of the Gingertown stories, "When I Pounded the Pavement," bears direct comparison to George Orwell's famous essay "Shooting an Elephant," in that both protagonists are reluctant, alienated members of the colonial constabulary forced into acts of aggression by a colonial hegemony that they are powerless to resist. In his description of the police hierarchy of "When I Pounded the Pavement," McKay offers a pithy, incisive analysis of Jamaican society:

   Many of our sergeant-majors and some
   of our inspectors had come to us from
   the Irish Constabulary and socially as
   white men they were practically
   nowhere in our very British-spirited
   colony with its insouciant mass of
   black and brown natives, a proud and
   self-sufficient mulatto aristocracy that
   had been building up and propagating
   its kind for generations upon generations,
   and a handful of British administrators.
   (203-04)

Because of the US-centered perspective of Harlem Renaissance criticism, McKay's Jamaican prose and poetry has been slighted, but increasing interest in Caribbean literature has broadened these horizons. Heather Hathaway's analysis of McKay's oeuvre as the product of a Caribbean identity restores a vital element to understanding his work and contribution. Hathaway masterfully uncovers the Caribbean inspiration behind the militant poems that first established McKay's reputation in the United States. Noting that in "New York, McKay's aesthetic and personal philosophies began to change and develop," she argues that McKay increasingly comprehended the centrality of color in class matters (41). Moreover, Hathaway suggests, he shared with many immigrants from the Caribbean the perception that race affected "every aspect of his life in the United States" (41). She continues:

   Under the realities of American segregation,
   in a world where he was now a
   member of the minority rather than the
   majority, McKay became critically
   aware ... of what it meant to be black
   in his new culture. Whereas the social
   criticism of his Jamaican poetry
   revolved almost exclusively around
   class oppression, the focus of McKay's
   American verse shifted to address the
   barbarities of racism.... [H]e
   expressed the rage felt by black newcomers,
   in particular, who came to
   America hoping to be welcomed into
   its melting pot, but who found themselves
   ostracized on the basis of skin
   color alone. (41-42)

Walrond, in contrast to McKay, writes out of not one but two colonial experiences. Having grown up in two empires, the British (British Guiana, Barbados) and the American (the Panama Canal Zone), Walrond's collection of Caribbean stories, Topic Death, reflects the differing oppressions of both mindsets. "Drought," "Panama Gold," "The Black Pin," "The White Snake," and "The Vampire Bat" are set in Barbados. These are Commonwealth stories reflecting the minds, the language and lives of the Black colonial subject. "Panama Gold" illustrates how deeply ingrained the sense of British identity can run, especially outside the British sphere. The title of the story refers to the money made by Mr. Poyer, a Barbadian migrant worker, while working as a brakeman during the construction of the Panama Canal. In compensation for a train accident that costs him his foot, Mr. Poyer receives enough money to return to Barbados and open a shop in the countryside. In order to get his money, however, Poyer has to threaten the Americans with "the British bulldog" (Tropic Death 42). "Man," he exclaims to a villager, Pettit Bruin, "le me tell yo' something. I let dem understand quick enough dat I waz a Englishman and not a bleddy American nigger! A' Englishman--big distinction in dat, Bruing! An' dat day couldn't do as day bleddy well please wit' a subject 'o the King!" (Tropic Death 42). (3)

As Poyer's experience reveals, however, much of the story of the Caribbean is about migration, movement, and the mix of island, Latin American, and metropolitan cultures. "The Yellow One" takes its title from the color of a Honduran woman, la madurita, sailing from the Panama Canal Zone where she had grown up to her Jamaican husband's homeland. Central to the story is the sexual and racial rivalry she unwittingly sparks between a light-skinned Cuban mulatto and a dark American Black. The autobiographical "Tropic Death" moves with its young Black protagonist from Barbados to the Canal Zone. Yet with such stories as "Subjection" and "The Palm Porch," Walrond pioneers the anglophone fiction of the American Caribbean empire.

Because American imperialism usually took the form of economic and political influence rather than outright annexation or the proclamation of a formal empire, its history has been harder to trace and less publicly acknowledged than its French and British counterparts. Furthermore, imperialist domination is fundamentally at odds with the egalitarian and democratic ideals of the American Revolution, and so the American people have often turned a blind eye to the foreign machinations of their politicians, bankers, business enterprises, and military. During the nineteenth century, the doctrine of Manifest Destiny "justified" the forced purchase, absorption, annexation, and bellicose theft of lands ruled by Spain and Mexico, but as historian Juan Gonzoles writes, "US territorial expansion did not climax with the closing of the western frontier; rather, it reached its culmination with the Spanish-American War of 1898" (56):

   Spain, a
   teetering
   stagnant
   power,
   was never
   a match
   for the rising
   United
   States. Its
   defeat
   finally
   achieved what Jefferson, John Quincy
   Adams, and other Founding Fathers
   had long sought: plopping Cuba, the
   juiciest plum of the Caribbean, into US
   palms, and securing Anglo American
   domination over Latin America for the
   next century. The Treaty of Paris that
   formally ended the war gave the
   United States direct control not only of
   Cuba but also over Puerto Rico, Guam,
   and the Philippines.

American imperialism differed from its French and British counterparts in that no consistent colonial policy was ever developed. Outside of its Spanish booty, American imperialism swamped and receded around the world--but mostly in the Caribbean--according to passing diplomatic and commercial interests. Between the end of the Spanish-American War and the dawn of the Great Depression, the United States sent troops to Latin American countries 32 times. It used the Roosevelt Corollary, an addition to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine declaring Latin America to be a United States "sphere of influence," to justify intervention. In the corollary, Teddy Roosevelt proclaimed, "Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power" (qtd. in Milkis 109).

Roosevelt, whose military exploits in the Spanish-American War originally propelled him onto the stage of national politics, was also responsible for another major addition to the largely unacknowledged American empire: the Panama Canal Zone. Because this empire stretched from the Caribbean across the Pacific, the old idea of a canal between the two oceans took on new urgency. "The canal," Roosevelt said, "was by far the most important action I took in foreign affairs during the time I was President. When nobody could or would exercise efficient authority, I exercised it" (qtd. in Buschini).

The idea had been tried before. In 1878 Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French engineer who built the Suez Canal, began to dig a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, then part of Colombia. Tropical disease and engineering problems halted construction on the canal, but a French business, the New Panama Canal Company, still held the rights to the project. Roosevelt agreed to pay $40 million for those rights, but when he offered Columbia $10 million for a 50-mile strip across the isthmus, Colombia refused. Roosevelt then covertly backed a plan for the armed succession of Columbia's Darien province. The chief engineer of the New Panama Canal Company participated in organizing a local revolt, helped along by the US sailors dispatched to the port city of Colon. The rebels, now constituting the sovereign government of Panama, gladly accepted Roosevelt's $10 million offer and gave the United States complete control of a 10-mile wide canal zone. Panama had attracted Caribbean immigrants since the 1880s, the period of the first French attempt to build a canal, but their numbers increased significantly when the US government began overseeing the project. The canal administrators preferred West Indian workers because they spoke English. During the 10-year period of the canal's construction (1904 to 1914), 25,000-30,000 West Indians were recruited for the project, Walrond's father among them. Gonzales estimates that, counting the families of those workers, more than 150,000 West Indians migrated to Panama during construction (67). Although economically advantageous, the move from the British to the American imperium was psychologically difficult for the Black laborer. The American masters imposed their racial attitudes upon the inhabitants of their possessions, and the Canal Zone replicated American racial conditions. "They established separate 'gold' payrolls for American citizens," Gonzales writes, "and much lower 'silver' ones for the noncitizen West Indians.... Blacks lived in squalid segregated company towns, while the whites resided in more opulent zone communities, where everything from housing to health care to vacations were subsidized by the federal government" (68).

Canal overseers were recruited from the US South, since it was believed that they already knew how to make Black men work, and the marines were as racist as the overseers. In one of Walrond's stories, "Subjection," a marine murders a Black laborer with impunity after he tries to prevent the torment of another Black worker. Making an invidious comparison between the two styles of empire in his essay "The Color of the Caribbean," Walrond writes, "The English did not go, like their nearsighted cousins of a century and a half later, with bombast and 'darky-hating' acts and epithets. They went instead with the one defined purpose of exploiting the mighty resources of the tropics" (145). The British, as implicated in the ideology of white superiority as the rest of the west, could nonetheless be more casual in its application since they had no homegrown population of Blacks with which to contend. Rather than instituting and maintaining an elaborate apartheid, they could simply let economics and the class system confine the vast majority of people of color within oppressed communities. No attempt was made to rigorously exclude the lucky and talented few who managed to escape. Furthermore, the mulatto offspring of matings between white men and Black women were not denied social standing or educational opportunities if offered by their lighter parent.

However, the Walrond story originally published in The New Negro, "The Palm Porch," illustrates how easily the casual racism of the British empire adapted to the formalized racism of the American one. The Palm Porch is a bordello run by a mulatta from Jamaica whose genteel manners barely mask the murderous ruthlessness that keeps her business going. Miss Buckner, though of mixed-race ancestry herself, is as virulently racist as any white cracker. Linguistically closer to the people she despises than to the white Spaniard whom she would make her protector, she picks at the scab of an old wound as she remembers how her eldest had taken up with "a willing young mulatto, a Christian in the Moravian Church."

   He was an able young man, strong and
   honest, and wore shoes, but Miss
   Buckner almost went mad--groaned at
   the pain her daughters caused her.
   "Oh, me Gahd," she had wept, "Oh,
   me Gahd, dem ah send me to de
   dawgs--dem ah send me to de
   dawgs." He was but a clerk in the cold
   storage; sixty dollars a month--wages
   of an accursed silver employee. Silver
   is nigger; nigger is silver. Nigger-silver
   ... Silver employee! Bah! Why
   couldn't he be a "Gold" one? Gold is
   white; white is gold. Gold-white!
   "Gold," and get $125 a month, like "de
   fella nex' tarrim, he? Why, him had to
   be black, an' get little pay, an' tek way
   me gal picknee from me? Now, hanswah
   me dat!" Nor did he get coal and
   fuel free, besides. He had to dig down
   and pay extra for them. He was not,
   alas!, white. Which hurt, left Miss
   Buckner cold; caused her nights of
   sleepless despair. Wretch! (Tropic Death
   92)

In its brilliant compression and ruthless analysis of the link between racism and capitalism, "The Palm Porch" depicts the world of American colonialism with febrile realism.

Yet it was the move to the Canal Zone that eventually led Walrond to the heart of the Harlem Renaissance. Beginning his writing career as a reporter for the English-language Panama Star and Herald, Walrond moved to the United States in 1918 where he lived for the next 10 years. Even though he had spent time in an American colony, Walrond was shocked, as McKay had been, by the racial prejudice he experienced.

   On coming to the United States, the
   West Indian often finds himself out of
   patience with the attitude he meets
   here respecting the position of whites
   and Negroes. He is bewildered ... at
   being shoved down certain blocks and
   alleys "among his own people." He is
   angry and amazed at the futility of
   seeking out certain types of employment
   for which he may be specially
   adapted. And about the cruelest injury
   that could be inflicted upon him is to
   ask him to submit to the notion that
   because he is black it is useless for him
   to aspire to be more than a trap drummer
   at Small's, a Red Cap in
   Pennsylvania Station, or a clerk in the
   Bowling Green Post Office. (146)

The racial shocks Walrond received primed him for an early, youthful enthusiasm for Marcus Garvey's ideological mixture of Black pride, diasporic consciousness, and defiance of white racism. After years of trying to make a place for himself in the American economy, Walrond's first professional break came as an associate editor of Garvey's Negro World, the most important Black weekly of the early 1920s. Negro World had a circulation of between 50,000 and 200,000; it published articles in English, French, and Spanish, and boasted the distinction of being banned by many colonial governments for its dangerous nationalism. As Cary Wintz points out, the "years of Walrond's involvement with the paper [1921-23] corresponded with the peak of Garvey's literary activity, some of which anticipated the developments several years later that launched the Harlem Renaissance" (148).

Growing impatient with Garvey's mismanagement and excesses, Walrond left the United Negro Improvement Association and Negro World to become the business manager under Charles S. Johnson of the National Urban League's monthly, Opportunity. This move put him at the center of the Harlem Renaissance. The 1925 award ceremony of the first Opportunity prizes constituted one of the signal opening events of the Renaissance, and it was Walrond who secured the money the following year from fellow West Indian Casper Holstein to finance the second contest. While working for Johnson, a tireless booster of the Renaissance, Walrond secured the publication of Tropic Death from the publishers Boni & Liveright. With its strange subject matter and stranger literary technique, Tropic Death quickly dropped from sight after garnering slight but enthusiastic critical attention. Though Walrond had moved beyond Garveyism at the time he wrote his Caribbean fiction, he shared one crucial aspect of his fame and reputation. Both Walrond and Garvey had moved from the Commonwealth world, with London at the center, to an American one, where New York ruled the publishing scene, the dissemination of literary production, and the elaboration of Black political ideology.

McKay, in his prose, introduced another dimension of the Caribbean postcolonial problematic, another complex interaction of imperialisms past and present--this time American and French--with his creation of the deracinated Haitian intellectual, Ray. Haiti, of course, was the French colony that had gotten away, the slave rebellion in 1802 that had actually succeeded in establishing and maintaining the independence of the West's first non-white independent country.

McKay's first novel, Home to Harlem (1928), gave to the world a natural, free-spirited, working-class Black protagonist by the name of lake Brown. (McKay's homeland also laid claim to the bestseller, awarding it a medal from the Jamaica Institute of Arts and Sciences.) While working as a cook on the railroad, lake meets and befriends the Haitian waiter, an intellectual and aspiring writer, who clearly serves as McKay's stand-in. Ignorant of Haiti's history, lake raptly takes in what McKay calls "a romance of his race" (134):

      Jake sat like a big eager boy and
   learned many facts about Hayti before
   the train reached Pittsburgh. He
   learned that the universal spirit of the
   French Revolution had reached and
   lifted up the slaves far away in that
   remote island; that Black Hayti's independence
   was more dramatic and picturesque
   than the United States' independence
   and that it was a strange,
   almost unimaginable eruption, of the
   beautiful idea of the "Liberte, Egalite,
   Fraternite" of Mankind, that shook the
   foundations of that romantic era,

      For the first time he heard the name
   Toussaint L'Ouverture, the black slave
   and leader of the Haytian slaves.
   Heard how he fought and conquered
   the slave-owners and then protected
   them; decreed laws for Hayti that held
   more of human wisdom and nobility
   than the Code Napoleon; defended his
   baby revolution against the Spanish
   and the English vultures; defeated
   Napoleon's punitive expedition; and
   how tragically he was captured by a
   civilized trick, taken to France, and
   sent by Napoleon to die broken-hearted
   in a cold dungeon. (131)

McKay wrote all of his novels and short stories during a self-imposed European exile that lasted from 1923 to 1934. He had already lived in France for a couple of years when composing Home to Harlem and so was familiar with France and her imperial adventures. Constructing Ray with a Haitian national identity allowed McKay to educate his American readers about a few heroic episodes of Black history. As critic John Lowney notes, "By writing the West Indian immigrant narrative as a narrative of Haitian exile, McKay suggests a common ground for cross-cultural dialogue among African American and Caribbean critics of American imperialism" (426).

Though Haiti had been independent since 1802, the country had come under increasing scrutiny from the United States with its acquisition of the Panama Canal Zone. Like many Latin American countries of the time, Haiti acquired a significant foreign debt, thus providing an excuse for European intervention. The Roosevelt Corollary stated that the United States would ensure against such intervention by assuming the burden of policing Latin American countries that were delinquent in honoring their international debts. When William Howard Taft, former governor of the Philippines, followed Roosevelt into the White House, he introduced the policy of "dollar diplomacy" to advance and protect American business in other countries. Election of the Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1912 did not change the thrust of American foreign policy, and the heated imperial ambitions of the European powers that led directly to the outbreak of World War I only increased America's desire to protect its self- proclaimed sphere of influence. The emphasis continued to be on limiting European influence, maintaining order, and furthering American economic interests. Germany, flexing its muscles since its 1870 victory in the Franco-Prussian war, was particularly hungry for empire, and the United States felt most threatened by perceived German initiatives in the Caribbean. The 1915 occupation stemmed directly from America's fear that the Germans might seize the Haitian harbor of Mole-Saint-Nicolas--an almost accidental by-product of World War I. As the historian Hans Schmidt writes:

      Mole-Saint-Nicolas, Samana Bay in
   the Dominican Republic, and the
   Danish West Indies were considered
   vulnerable to German seizure because
   the United States lacked firm control
   over local politics in each case.... The
   Wilson administration took over all
   three by establishing military occupations
   in Haiti in 1915, in the Dominican
   Republic in 1916, and by purchasing
   the economically worthless Danish
   West Indies in 1916. (57)

Ray ends up in the United States as a result of the same geopolitical events that brought the arrival of Casper Holstein and Eric Walrond: as inhabitants of the de facto American empire, they emigrated from the margins to the center. When Jake asks Ray why, as an educated Black, he works the railroad, Ray replies that Uncle Sam put him there. Through Ray's story, McKay scores more points about the nature of American imperialism.

   Maybe you don't know that during the
   World War Uncle Sam grabbed Hayti.
   My father was an official down there.
   He didn't want Uncle Sam in Hayti
   and he said so and said it loud. They
   told him to shut up and he wouldn't so
   they shut him up in jail. My brother
   also made a noise and American
   marines killed him in the street. I had
   nobody to pay for me at the university,
   so I had to get out and work. Voila!
   (Home to Harlem 138)

In Home to Harlem, McKay presents Ray as a complex deracinated intellectual who recognizes Black kinship even as he kicks against it. "Why should he have and love a race?" he asks himself during a battle with insomnia (154). It was race that cast him in the category of the oppressed: "Ray felt that as he was conscious of being black and impotent, so, correspondingly, each marine down in Hayti must be conscious of being white and powerful" (154). It was race that bound him to men and women with whom he shared no other bond: "He remembered when little Hayti was floundering uncontrolled, how proud he was to be the son of a free nation. He used to feel condescendingly sorry for those poor African natives; superior to ten millions of suppressed Yankee 'coons.' Now he was just one of them and he hated them for being one of them ..." (155).

In Banjo (1929), his next novel, McKay transposes the formless, buddy structure of Home to Harlem to Marseilles, a site that allows the author to expatiate at length upon the nature of the Black diaspora. Ray reappears as intellectual sidekick to another version of the life-loving, charismatic American Black, Lincoln Agrippa Daily, a.k.a. Banjo. Banjo lives the life of a beach bum, gathering around him an international collection of similarly situated expatriate Blacks from the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States. As in Home to Harlem, McKay describes at length the lowlife of the Black underclass, but the international reach of his dramatis personae allows him to cast his discursive net over the whole of the Black diaspora.

      The port was a fine big wide-open
   hole and the docks were wide open
   too. Ray loved the piquant variety of
   the things of the docks as much as he
   loved their colorful human interest.
   And the highest to him was the
   Negroes of the port. In no other port
   had he ever seen congregated such a
   picturesque variety of Negroes.
   Negroes speaking the civilized
   tongues, Negroes speaking all the
   African dialects, black Negroes, brown
   Negroes, yellow Negroes. It was as if
   every country of the world where
   Negroes lived had sent representatives
   drifting in to Marseilles. A great
   vagabond host of jungle-like Negroes
   trying to scrape a temporary existence
   from the macadamized surface of this
   great Provencal port. (68)

In his description of life in The Ditch, McKay analyzes all of the elements that not only separate Black humanity--class, national origin, language, ideology--but those that bring them together: white racism and its imposition of Black consciousness. Because the novel is set in France, the racism depicted is generally French in origin, in spite of France's claim, accepted even by some of her gens de couleur, that racism is foreign to her spirit. McKay exposes the hypocrisy of such a claim by writing an episode in which Ray is beaten by a gendarme simply for being a Black man in the wrong neighborhood. "The French are never tired of proclaiming themselves the most civilized people in the world," he expostulates to his white companion. "They think they understand Negroes, because they don't discriminate against us in their bordels. They imagine that Negroes like them. But Senghor, the Senegalese, told me that the French were the most calculatingly cruel of all the Europeans in Africa" (267).

The invocation of Senghor, almost two decades before he became famous as the father of negritude, is both remarkable and prophetic. Although written in English and put out by an American publisher, Banjo is more of a negritude novel than an American or a British one. Negritude, an ideology of Black unity born at the heart of the French empire, posited a Black essentialism that theoretically transcended imperial and linguistic boundaries but practically had its greatest influence and productivity within the francophone world. In order to help them formulate their inchoate ideology during the 1930s, the founders of negritude, Leopold Senghor (Senegal), Aime Cesaire (Martinique), and Leon Damas (French Guiana), looked to the writings of the Harlem Renaissance as examples of literary expression of a positive Black consciousness.

Black Writers in French, Lilyan Kesteloot's groundbreaking literary history of negritude, features a whole chapter on the influence of the Harlem Renaissance on the Black students who contributed to the creation of negritude. She writes of the Paris salon of Paulette Nardal, founder of the Revue du Monde Noir, where African and Caribbean students met such visiting writers as Alain Locke, Countee Cullen (both ardent francophiles), Jean Toomer, and Langston Hughes. "[O]ne can assert," Kesteloot writes, "that the real fathers of the Negro cultural renaissance in France were neither the writers of the West Indian tradition, nor the surrealist poets, nor French novelists of the era between the two wars, but black writers of the United States. They made a very deep impression on French Negro writers by claiming to represent an entire race, launching a cry with which all blacks identified--the first cry of rebellion" (57).

In 1932, as the Renaissance was deflating due to the Great Depression, three Martinican students in Paris put out the single issue of a radically racialized journal entitled Legitime Defense that Kesteloot has identified as an important annunciation of negritude. At the end of his condemnatory examination of francophone Caribbean literature, Etienne Lero declaimed, "The wind that blows from black America will soon manage, let us hope, to cleanse our Antilles, of the aborted fruit of an obsolete culture. Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, two revolutionary black poets, have brought us, marinated in red alcohol, the African love of life, the African joy of love, the African dream of death" (qtd. in Fabre 154-55).

The poetry of Damas and Cesaire fulfilled the prophecy. Damas in particular seemed to reproduce the corrosive simplicity, filtered through surrealism, of Langston Hughes in his more acerbic moments. Published in 1937, the poem "Treve" summons an American scene that the French student of Guyanese origin could have only known about through the myth of the Harlem Renaissance.

   Treve
   Treve de blues
   de martelements de piano
   de trompette bouchee
   de folie claquant des pieds
   la satisfaction de rythme

   Treve de seances a tant le swing
   autour de rings
   qu'enervent
   des cris de fauves

   Treve de lachage
   de lechage
   de leche
   et
   d'une attitude
   d'hyperassimiles

   Treve un insant
   d'une vie de bon enfant
   et de desirs
   et de besoins
   et d'ego'ismes
   particuliers.

   Enough
   Enough of the blues
   of hammering the piano
   of muted trumpet
   of madness beating its feet
   to the satisfaction of the rhythm

   Enough of sessions at so much a
   punch.
   at ringsides
   jarred by cries
   of untamed beasts

   Enough of boot-licking
   butt-licking
   buttering up
   and
   that posturing
   of the super-assimilated

   Enough for a while
   of the easy-going life
   and the wishes
   and the needs
   and the selfishness
   of individuals.

Unlike Damas, McKay didn't have to imagine the diasporic Marseilles that he depicts in Banjo; he lived the life he describes. His biographer, Wayne Cooper, notes that Banjo "made an overwhelming impression on French West African students in France when it appeared there in translation in 1929" (258). He also speaks of its influence on the negritude writers outside of the founding triumvirate:

   Ousman Soce remembered that "Banjo
   was displayed in black-student bookshelves
   right next to a book by [the
   anthropologist] Delafosse," who was
   also writing sympathetically of African
   culture. In 1950, Joseph Zobel remembered
   in La Rue Cases Negres that Banjo
   also aroused much discussion in
   Martinique. Finally, in 1956, Sembene
   Ousmane from Senegal wrote Le docker
   noir, a novel that Kesteloot believed
   "was more influenced by Banjo than by
   the novels of Richard Wright, to which
   Le docker noir is occasionally compared."
   In interviewing Senghor,
   Damas, and Cesaire in the early 1960s,
   Kesteloot found they could "still cite
   entire chapters" of Banjo. "What struck
   me in this book," Cesaire recalled, "is
   that for the first time Negroes were
   described truthfully, without inhibition
   or prejudice." (269)

It is easy to see why the book had the impact that it did upon the nascent ideology; Banjo is a negritude novel avant la lettre. (4) Not only does it excoriate the hypocrisy of French racism, it provides an early and accurate analysis of the false consciousness of the evolue later so masterfully dissected by Franz Fanon in Peau noire, masques blanques (1952). In chapter 16, Ray has a discussion with a Black student from Martinique who glories in the fact that the Empress Josephine was born there and who deplores the coming of Black Africans to France in the wake of the Great War. Ray criticizes him for trying to distance himself from other Blacks who are considered less "civilized" by white standards: "You're a lost crowd, you educated Negroes, and you will only find yourselves in the roots of your own people" (201).

Banjo anticipated all of the major themes of negritude: the healthy primitivism of Black consciousness opposing the mechanized sterility of white civilization; the distortion of Black values as filtered through white prejudice and education; the uncomplicated, natural sexuality of the Black man; the essential oneness of Black identity and the sense of rhythm at its base; Africa as the original source of authenticity. The following passage not only formulates McKay's working out of negritude ideology but also uncovers its Caribbean origin.

      The Africans gave [Ray] a positive
   feeling of wholesome contact with
   racial roots. They made him feel that
   he was not merely an unfortunate accident
   of birth, but that he belonged definitely
   to a race weighed, tested, and
   poised in the universal scheme. They
   inspired him with confidence in them.
   Short of extermination by the
   Europeans, they were a safe people,
   protected by their own indigenous culture.
   Even though they stood bewildered
   before the imposing bigness of
   white things, apparently unaware of
   the invaluable worth of their own, they
   were naturally defended by the richness
   of their fundamental racial values.

      He did not feel that confidence
   about Aframericans who, long-deracinated,
   were still rootless among phantoms
   and pale shadows and enfeebled
   by self-effacement before condescending
   patronage, social negativism, and
   miscegenation. At college in America
   and among the Negro intelligentsia he
   had never experienced any of the simple,
   natural warmth of a people believing
   in themselves, such as he had felt
   among the rugged poor and socially
   backward blacks of his island home.
   The colored intelligentsia lived its life
   "to have the white neighbors think
   well of us," so that it could move more
   peaceably into nice "white" streets.

      Only when he got down among the
   black and brown working boys and
   girls of the country did he find something
   of that raw unconscious and the-devil-with-them
   pride in being Negro
   that was his own natural birthright.
   (320)

True to his belief that the greatest racial authenticity resided among the Black proletariat, McKay shunned literary circles in France and America, but his writings were central to both the Harlem Renaissance and the inchoate negritude movement that matured in the following decades. He was the postcolonial hyphen that linked negritude to that necessary manifestation of Black consciousness that prepared the way for the Harlem Renaissance--Garveyism.

Without Garveyism, the Harlem Renaissance would have developed along considerably different lines. As crack-brained and as badly mismanaged as the movement became, during its heroic period from 1917 to 1922, it seized the hearts and minds of the African American and West Indian working class Blacks as no previous ideology had ever done. In an article on Garvey published in The Liberator, McKay dubbed this period "five years of stupendous vaudeville" ("Garvey as a Negro Moses" 69). The class difference that Ray noted in the quote above held true for the Garveyite masses as well. Du Bois's Talented Tenth and the civil rights organizations with which they worked deplored the Jamaican propagandist and his wild ideas. In spite of The New Negro's inclusion of West Indian writers, the writings of Marcus Garvey represent a huge lacuna in the presentation of the modern spirit that Locke claimed to characterize. Of course, by 1925 the federal government had placed Garvey in a US prison after a trumped up conviction on charges of mail fraud. Without the widespread dissemination of and excitement generated by the Universal Negro Improvement Association and its creation of the Black Star Line in the period immediately preceding the Harlem Renaissance, though, the psychology of the New Negro would have been probably less assertive. Garveyism, with its emphasis on African colonization and its disdain for the leadership and integrationist goals of such civil rights organizations as the NAACP and the NUL, was anathema to the mainstream race leaders, and The New Negro was nothing if not a Talented Tenth production.

Nonetheless, Garveyism could not be ignored as a factor in the development of the Harlem Renaissance, and no subsequent anthology of Harlem Renaissance writings has failed to include some of the Jamaican's writing (Huggins 34-42 and D. Lewis, The Portable Harlem Renaissance 17-28). The Black nationalism that Garvey espoused--a volatile mixture of Black pride, defiance, imperial pageantry, and far-fetched economic initiatives--planted his particular form of militancy permanently into the African American ideological arsenal. As Garvey's biographer Edmund Cronen notes, "The enthusiastic response to Garvey's persuasive program of Black nationalism shows beyond all question that the Negro masses can be reached through an emotional appeal based on race pride" (203). (5) Yet although the Harlem Renaissance was unquestionably a creation of the Black intelligentsia and white avant garde, Garveyism laid the groundwork for the crossing of class boundaries effectuated by such writers as Hughes, Hurston, and Sterling Brown. Tony Martin argues that the Negro World provided a kind of rehearsal space for the Harlem Renaissance before the mid-1920s, and continued to act as booster for certain of its personalities until its demise in 1928: "The younger writers and artists are showcased, praised, and criticized, Amy Jacques Garvey is wildly enthusiastic about Langston Hughes; Garvey and his editors alternatively praise and condemn McKay; Hurston is given her first national and international exposure; and Augusta Savage comes to Harlem, works on a bust of Garvey, publishes poetry in the paper and marries the UNIA's secretary general" (xviii).

Yet if the Americans mentioned above were never Garveyites, West Indian writers and journalists--namely, Eric Walrond and W. A. Domingo--had their flirtations. Indeed it was the West Indian commentators Walrond and McKay who uncovered the Jamaican elements of Garvey's ideology. McKay pointed out the messianic similarities between Garveyism and a homegrown prophet named Alexander Bedward, a Black Baptist preacher: "To those who know Jamaica, the homeland of Marcus Garvey, Garveyism inevitably suggests the name of Bedwardism" ("Garvey" 66). Bedward taught that he was the reincarnation of Christ and that his ascension into heaven would be accompanied by the destruction of the white race. Like Garveyism, Bedward's movement attracted the most oppressed and least educated sector of the Black population. (6) The British recognized the covert racial and nationalist agendas under cover of religious frenzy, and arrested Bedward for sedition in 1891. He was judged insane but released, whereupon he continued his preaching until finally committed to an asylum in 1921. Anticolonial sentiment among the masses often took the form of religious exaltation: Kimbanguism in the Belgian Congo, the Maji Maji rebellion of Tanganyika, followers of the Mahdi in the Sudan. Even in the United States the bloodiest and most successful of the slave rebellions, that led by Nat Turner, drew its inspiration from religious prophecy. The American civil rights organizations with their middle-class orientation could not tap into the power of religious fervor, but Garvey who, like Bedward, often referred to the Biblical passage "Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands to God" (Psalm 68:31), instituted an African Orthodox Church that soon taught that both God and Christ were Black. Countee Cullen, cultured and genteel, could not be called a Garveyite by any stretch of the imagination, but in his tortured grappling with Black identity, "Heritage," he follows, however reluctantly, Garvey's lead.

   Lord, I fashion dark gods, too,
   Daring even to give You
   Dark despairing features, where,
   Crowned with dark rebellious hair,
   Patience wavers just so much as
   Mortal grief compels, while touches
   Quick and hot, of anger, rise
   To smitten cheek and weary eyes.
   Lord, forgive me if my need
   Sometimes shapes a human creed.

Like the assertive New Negro, Cullen's dark Christ, "crowned with dark rebellious hair," responds to his torment with hot, quick anger.

In his 1925 article titled "Imperator Africanus," Walrond brought out another Jamaican element in Garvey's thinking: the blacker the berry, the sweeter the fruit. Contrary to the color struck notions of African Americans of the period, Garveyism celebrated dark skin. As Walrond writes:

   In the island of his birth, Jamaica, a
   land with as many color distinctions as
   there are eggs in a shad's roe, and all
   through his life, the fact that he was
   black was unerringly borne in upon
   him. Wherever he went, whether to
   Wolmer's, the college patronized by
   the upper-class mulattoes in Jamaica,
   or to Europe or Central America as
   student and journalist, he was continuously
   reminded he was black and that
   it was futile for him to rise above the
   "hewer of wood and drawer of water."

      In Jamaica, as elsewhere in the
   United Kingdom, England differentiates
   between the full bloods and the
   half bloods. In Garvey's Jamaica, the
   mulattoes are next in power to the
   whites. The blacks, who outnumber
   them three to one, have actually no
   voice politically or economically. (122)

Garvey's mistrust of mulattoes, a habit of mind shared by his fellow Jamaican McKay, contributed to the rift between him and the leaders of the civil rights organizations. Du Bois's Talented Tenth was light in color and valued itself accordingly.

Garveyism validated previously scorned elements of African American culture: dark skin, African origins, racial particularity. Garvey preached this color appraisal in America but not out of an American perspective. His philosophy grew in the humus of the British Empire. Garvey cut his anticolonial teeth in Jamaica in 1910 as secretary of the National Club, an organization started by "a near-white barrister who had been discriminated against in the Civil Service, and who was said to have been influenced by the Sinn Fein movement. The Club called for 'self-government within the Empire' similar to that of Canada and Australia" (R. Lewis 42).

The Irish connection underscores the British anticolonial context out of which Garvey and McKay were operating. Sectors of the Irish population had been agitating against the British occupation of their island since the crystallization of nationalist sentiment toward the end of the eighteenth century. World attention focused on this struggle with the execution of 16 nationalist leaders who had helped to lead a week-long rebellion during Easter 1916. During his opening speech to the 1920 convention of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, attended by 25,000 delegates and representing the movement at its zenith, Garvey announced that the association had sent a telegram to the Irish Republican leader, Eamon De Valera, conveying sympathy for the nationalist cause. "We believe Ireland should be free even as Africa shall be free for the Negroes of the world," the telegram read. "Keep up the fight for a free Ireland" (qtd. in Cronon 64). In Banjo, McKay has his mouthpiece, Ray, counsel his brainwashed Martinican interlocutor that he should turn away from the haughty French as social models: "If you were sincere in your feelings about racial advancement, you would turn for example to whites of a different type. You would study the Irish cultural and social movement" (201).

From the colonial margins, Garvey eventually made a sojourn to the imperial center. He had already spent time in Costa Rica, the Canal Zone, and Ecuador, observing with growing indignation that the Black man was exploited everywhere he worked. From 1912 to 1914 Garvey lived in London, meeting colonized intellectuals from other parts of the empire and learning about the condition of Blacks around the world. Central to his development was his association with the Black Egyptian journalist, Duse Mohamed Ali. Duse Mohamed published the monthly African Times and Orient Review, with which Garvey was associated and to which he occasionally contributed articles. Duse Mohamed campaigned for Egyptian home rule, but his monthly served as a precursor to Third World publications, sweeping into its purview the peoples of Africa, the West Indies, China, Persia, India, and Black Americans. (7) The October 1913 issue carried Garvey's article "The British West Indies in the Mirror of Civilization," which espouses the ideology of Garveyism in gestation.

   As one who knows the people well, I
   make no apology for prophesying that
   there will soon be a turning point in
   the history of the West Indies; and that
   the people who inhabit that portion of
   the Western Hemisphere will be the
   instruments of uniting a scattered race
   who, before the close of many centuries,
   will found an Empire on which
   the sun shall shine as ceaselessly as it
   shines on the Empire of the North
   today. (qtd. in R. Lewis 47)

Ironically--and this fact shows just how racial solidarity can subvert imperial influence--Garvey's discovery of Booker T. Washington's autobiography in London inflamed his imagination and convinced him that it was his destiny to found the Black center: "I read Up From Slavery ... and my doom--if I may so call it-- of being a race leader dawned upon me.... I asked: 'Where is the black man's Government? where is his King and his kingdom? Where is his President, his country, and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs?' I could not find them, and then I declared, 'I will help to make them'" (qtd. in Cronon 16). Returning to Jamaica, Garvey launched the Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association and African Communities' League (later shortened to the UNIA) on August 1, 1914, Emancipation Day, which was then celebrated as the day marking the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies.

The next eight years saw the birth and rise of a movement that would grip the imagination of the Black diaspora as none had ever done before. America gave Garvey--as it gave McKay and Walrond--the platform from which to speak, but the vision that he put forth subverted all national and imperial paradigms. Neither New York nor London nor Paris was the center of the world--that place would be the Africa of the future.

Garveyism was one of the earliest and most seminal expressions of diasporic consciousness that later recurred in the ideologies of negritude, the African Personality, and Afrocentrism. The rational, moderate, middle class orientation of pan-Africanism that Du Bois was trying to promote at the same time stood no chance against the trumpeting fantasia of Garveyism as Black wish-fulfillment. (8) "Black men, you were once great; you shall be great again" (Garvey 25). Although the movement had partially self-destructed, partially succumbed to outside attack by the time The New Negro announced the advent of the Harlem Renaissance, Garvey's ideas had filtered down to the younger generation of African American writers. Hughes and Cullen would write of Africa; Hughes and Hurston embraced a diasporic consciousness. Black pride and Black militancy had become part of the African American mental landscape. In spite of his silence on the subject, Locke's New Negro had Garvey as a not-so-secret ancestor. (9)

The most postcolonial aspect of the Harlem Renaissance was its promulgation of a Black identity that transcended white labels: West Indian, Negro, African. "What is Africa to me?" Cullen famously asked in "Heritage." A link to others of African descent and heritage, something that overflowed the colonial and national formations of the west. Certainly the Harlem Renaissance was American, but because, for the first time, it was also a cultural movement of significant Black autonomy, it realized the promise of a diasporic consciousness that had always been implicit in Black identity and that would later pose a momentous challenge to the dominant paradigms of national identity, colonial centers, and literary traditions defined by the languages of the west. (10)

Works Cited

Buschini, J. "The Panama Canal." Small Planet Communications. 2000. 15 Jan. 2003. <http://www.smplanet.com/imperialism/joining.html>

Cronon, David Edmund. Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1966.

Domingo, Wilfrid A. "Gift of the Black Tropics." Locke 341-49.

Du Bois, W. E. B. "The Negro Mind Reaches Out." Locke 385-414.

Fabre, Michel. From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991.

Fisher, Rudolph. The Conjure Man Dies. New York: Covici, Friede, 1932.

--. "Ringtail." The Short Fiction of Rudolph Fisher. Ed. Margaret Perry. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1987. 42-54.

Garvey, Marcus. "Africa for the Africans." The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. New York: Viking, 1994. 17-25.

Gonzales, Juan. Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. New York: Viking, 2000.

Hathaway, Heather. Caribbean Waves: Relocating Claude McKay and Paule Marshall. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.

Huggins, Nathan Irving. Voices from the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford UP, 1976.

Kesteloot, Lilyan. Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude. Trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1974.

Lewis, David Leavering, ed. The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. New York: Viking, 1994.

--. When Harlem Was In Vogue. New York: Oxford UP, 1979.

Lewis, Rupert. Marcus Garvey, Anti-Colonial Champion. Trenton, NJ: Africa World P, 1988.

Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro. 1925. New York: Atheneum, 1986.

Lowney, John. "Haiti and Black Transnationalism: Remapping the Migrant Geography of Home to Harlem." African American Review 34 (2000): 413-29.

McKay, Claude. "Garvey as a Negro Moses." The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose, 1912-1948. Ed. Wayne F. Cooper. New York: Schocken, 1973. 65-69.

--. Gingertown. New York: Harper, 1932.

--. Home to Harlem. New York: Harper, 1928.

Martin, Tony. "Preface." African Fundamentalism: A Literary and Cultural Anthology of Garvey's Harlem Renaissance. Ed. Tony Martin. Dover, MA: Majority P, 1983. xv-xviii.

Milkis, Sidney. "History of the Presidency." Congressional Quarterly's Guide to the Presidency. Ed. Michael Nelson. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1996.61-162.

Osofsky, Gilbert. Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto. Negro New York, 1890-1930. New York: Harper, 1971.

Orwell, George. "Shooting an Elephant." Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt, 1950.3-12.

Parascandola, Louis J., ed. "Winds Can Wake up the Dead": An Eric Walrond Reader. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1998.

Schmidt. Hans. The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1971.

Sengor, Leopold S. "La Poesie Negro-Americaine." Liberte, vol. 1. Negritude et Humanisme. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964). 104-21

Shapiro, Norman, ed. and trans. Negritude: Black Poetry from African and the Caribbean. New York: October House, 1970.

Van Vechten, Carl. Nigger Heaven. New York: Knopf, 1926.

Walrond, Eric. "The Color of the Caribbean." Parascandola 142-46.

--. "The Godless City." Parascandola 161-72.

--. "Imperator Africanus." Parascandola 121-27.

--. Tropic Death. 1926. New York: Collier, 1972.

Wintz, Cary D. Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance. Houston: Rice UP, 1988.

Notes

(1.) Holstein was portrayed in Carl Van Vechten's roman a clef of the Harlem Renaissance, Nigger Heaven, under the name "Randolph Pettijohn, the Bolito King" (19). As Van Vechten's prissy heroine reflects, "She even tried not to be a snob when she thought of the manner in which he had accumulated his fortune. Hot-dogs, cabarets, even gambling, all served their purposes in life, no doubt, although the game of Numbers was deliberate-and somewhat heartless, considering the average winnings-appeal to a weakness in the ignorant members of her race which she could not readily condone" (19-20).

(2.) Cf. "Ringtail," by Fisher.

(3.) In McKay's 1928 novel, Home to Harlem, a young West Indian woman breaks up a catfight between two other West Indian girls in a Harlem cabaret with the comment, "It's a shame. Can't you act like decent English people?" (97).

(4.) In a 1950 lecture on "La Poesie Negro-Americaine," Senghor declared, "Claude McKay can rightfully be considered the true inventor of Negritude. I speak not of the word, but of the values of Negritude" (116).

(5.) Garveyism, soon gutted as an immediate political force, fed into all the Black nationalist ideologies that came to birth in later decades from the Nation of Islam to Afrocentrism; it also fathered Rastafarianism "back home" in Jamaica.

(6.) In a 1924 story published in Success magazine, Walrond introduces a Jamaican maroon given to prophecy who is a former Bedwardite ("The Godless City" 162).

(7.) At the height of the Garvey movement, Duse Mohamed wrote for the Negro Worldon a weekly basis.

(8.) "Pan-Africanism as a living movement, a tangible accomplishment, is a little and negligible thing," Du Bois wrote in his compte rendu published in The New Negro (Locke 411). It wasn't until the British Commonwealth had produced an African middle class elite capable of leading the masses that Pan-Africanism really took off as a potent ideology in the 1940s.

(9.) Senghor declared the parentage before any American commentators: "The African mystique preached by Garvey bore its fruit. When negritude is discovered, cultivated and exalted, it's because Africa is considered as a rich heritage. Of course, this Africa is adorned with all the virtues lacking in the industrial civilization of the Whites: courage, nobility, beauty. But also innocence in liberty. Africa thus becomes a peaceful refuge from the hardness of the American world, a bath of primitive life against the sophistication of white culture" (120).

(10.) The diasporic consciousness of the Harlem Renaissance points the way from colonial literary traditions (francophone, Commonwealth) to transnational formations that transcend these histories and literary traditions. McKay and Wright can be studied in the context of an international Left along with Maxim Gorky and Henri Barbusse. Nugent and Cullen would easily fit into gay and lesbian canons that include Andre Gide, Garcia Lorca, and Arturo Islas. Cf. Hughes's 1926 poem "Negro."

Robert Philipson is an independent scholar who lives in Oakland, California. He has published articles on African and African American literature in Callaloo, Research in African Literatures, and other venues.