The Jook

1) The “Jook” is the most important musical space in America, for in it blues and jazz were born

2) The sexuality of the “Jook” has infused itself into the sensuality of Negro music.

3) Negro theatre (as built up by Negroes) is based on “Jook situations,” even though some of the upper class Negro population is embarrassed of this fact and tries to efface it. In fact, it is the only form of Negro theatre.

4) White performers are continually trying to recreate the Jook and continually failing. Likewise, Negro music taken out of the Jook for white audiences does not constitue authentic Negro performance.

5) How does Hurston’s description set Negro theater apart from other forms? What are the implications of the value, here, placed on audience?

Absence of the Concept of Privacy

1) The Negro is accustomed to communal life wherein privacy is not only a foreclosed possibility, but a potential danger.

2) Openness allows the community to deal with its discord (a more natural occurring phenomenon than accord).

3) Lovemaking and fighting—since they are topics suitable fot bragging in the Negro community—are like everything else that demands acclaim, “high-art” forms.

4) Does this point seem to fit on this essay? If not, why include it?

Dialect1) The issue of dialect is a contentious

one, and the Negro community posses more than anybody else.

2) Moreover, not all members of a dialect-community adhere to the rules of that given dialect, and it has become anathema to blanketly associate Negroes with dialect.

3) Nevertheless, certain rules are operative, definable, and appear in

black art.

Home to Harlem

By

Claude McKay

Claude McKay (1889-1948)

1) Jamaican writer, policeman, poet, and journalist 2) Songs of Jamaica (1912), McKay’s first poetry collection, contained the first poems published in Patois 3) Constab Ballads (1912), Mckay’s second collection was based on his experience as a police officer in

Jamaica.4) In 1912, McKay leaves Jamaica for the U.S. and enrolls at Tuskegee Institute, studying agriculture.5) In 1914, McKay –appalled by the brutality of U.S. racism---quits Tuskegee for Japan and marries Eulalie

Lewars.6) In 1919, McKay befriends Max Eastman—editor of the socialist journal The Liberator—and publishes “If

We Must Die” therein. Soon thereafter, Mckay becomes co-editor of the journal until 19227) During his time as an editor at the Liberator, McKay befriends a group of black radicals who were

unhappy with both Marcus Garvey’s nationalism and the middle-class reformist NAACP.8) Along with Cyril Brigs, Richard More, and Wilfred Domingo, McKay founds a clandestine organization

dedicated to socialist revolution called African Blood Brotherhood in London England, writing for several communist and socialist journals including Workers’ Dreadnought and Cambridge Magazine.

9) His novels include Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1930), and Banana Bottom (1933)10) He also published two autobiographies and one collection of short stories.11) In Later life he renounces Communism and embraces Roman Catholicism

Red Summer 1919Red Summer, a term coined by author James Weldon

Johnson, is used to describe the summer and autumn of 1919. Race riots erupted in several cities in both the North and South of U.S. The three most violent episodes happened in Chicago, Washington D.C., and Elaine, Arkansas. These were part of a series of 20 or more race riots occurring in the U.S where blacks were the victims of physical attacks, including:

1919 - Charleston Race Riot, May 10, 1919 - Longview Race Riot, early July, 1919 - Washington, D.C. Race Riot, July1919 - Chicago Race Riot, July 27 - Aug. 2, 1919 - Knoxville Race riot, Aug. 30, 1919 - Omaha Race Riot, Sept. 28, (pictured)1919 - Elaine Race Riot, Oct. 1,

Claude McKay, “If We Must Die” (1919)

If we must die, let it not be like hogsHunted and penned in an inglorious spot,While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,Making their mock at our accursed lot.

If we must die, O let us nobly die,So that our precious blood may not be shedIn vain; then even the monsters we defyShall be constrained to honor us though dead!

O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

McKay, “Return to the Primitive” (1923):Primitivism, Futurism, Cubo-Futurism, and Communism

Part I“[O]ur age is the age of Negro

art. The slogan of the aesthetic world is ‘Return to the Primitive.’ The Futurists and the Impressionists are agreed in turning everything upside down in an attempt to achieve the wisdom of the primitive Negro.” Claude McKay

Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti

1876-1944

Miguel Covarrubias

Pablo Picasso1881-1973

Picasso’s “Femme nue....”

Boccioni’s “Unique Forms

in Continuity and Space”

Kazimir Malevich “The Knife Grinder”

McKay, “Return to the Primitive” (1923):Primitivism, Futurism, Cubo-Futurism, and Communism

Part II

MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM2) The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt. 3) Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist. 4) We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on. 6) The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements. 7) Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man. 9) We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons [….] steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.

Marinetti’s Poesia Goncharova’s The CyclistCarlo Carrà, Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1910-1911)

Claude McKay’s Russian Sojourn and Journalism

1) The Soviet Union invites McKay to go on a junket through the nation under the auspices of the New Economic Policy (NEP), launched in 1921 and ending, with the first Five-Year Plan of 1928.

2) The era of the NEP is distinguished as a era of broad-mindedness and relative tolerance, the NEP years reintroduced to Russia a contained capitalism, and during this period images of the United States abounded in film, journalism, and other routes of consumer culture.

3) Although the United States continued to be condemned as the paragon of evil capitalism, American methods of industrialization and technological advance were supported and admired

Communism, Humanism, and the Racial Ideal:McKay, “Soviet Russia and the Negro” (1923)

To the Russians, I was merely another type, but stranger, with which they were not yet familiar....[T]heir curiosity had none of the intolerable impertinence and often downright affront that any very dark colored man, be he Negro, Indian or Arab, would experience in Germany or England.

The English people from the lowest to the highest, cannot think of a black man as being anything but an entertainer, a boxer, a Baptist preacher or a menial. The Germans are just a little worse. Any healthy looking black coon of an adventurous streak can have a wonderful time palming himself off as another Siki or a buck dancer. When an American writer introduced me as a poet to a very cultured German, a lover of all the arts, he could not believe it, and I don’t think he does yet. An American student tells his middle-class landlady that he is having a black friend to lunch: ‘But are you sure that he is not a cannibal?’ she asks, without a flicker of a humorous smile! But in Petrograd and Moscow, I could not detect a trace of this ignorant snobbishness among the educated classes, and the attitude of the common workers, the soldiers and sailors was still more remarkable. It was so beautifully naive; for them I was only a black member of the world of humanity.

Trotsky to McKay (1923)

When the hand of capitalism or even sooner the hand of militarism tears them [Negroes] mechanically from their customary environment and forces them to stake their lives for the sake of new and complicated questions and conflicts, then their spiritual conservatism gives way abruptly and revolutionary ideas find rapid access to a consciousness thrown off its balance.

McKay “Negroes In America”:The Question of Black Nationalism and

Internationalism

For the Negro in America it is very useful to be imbued with race consciousness, but it is still more useful for him to look at the problem which disturbs him from a class point of view, and to join the class struggle as an ‘internationalist.’

Although an international Socialist...I believe that, for subject peoples, at least, nationalism is the open door to Communism.

The U.S. Negro Vanguard:McKay’s Insistence on a Diaspora of Difference

A Confidential Comintern Memo

“The American Negro, by reason of his higher education and culture, his greater capacity for leadership and because of the urgency of the issues in America, will furnish the leadership to the Negro race.”

 

McKay, “For a Negro Congress”

The Negro population of the world is estimated to be about 200 million; but the articulate revolt against imperialist oppression comes from that SMALL MINORITY THAT IS MORE OR LESS in close contact with the white proletariat of America and Africa, and has somewhat assimilate the culture of the exploiting race. Thus, it is the Negro population of the U.S., the Caribbean islands and West and South Africa that is active in the modern movement against imperialist exploitation.

Home to Harlem (1928):Central Themes and Key Concepts

1) The overlap, competition, and intersection of discourses on race and the “race problem.” McKay’s Primitivism (as an alternative humanism)

2) African-American intra-group hybridity3) The “Cage of Civilization”4) Harlem as both a locale of jubilant

primitivism or a locus of moral, social, and economic exploitation of the proletariat.

5) Unity in Difference6) The recuperation of the Revolutionary

lumpen7) Vagabondism8) Black Internationalism vs. Black

Nationalism

Going Back Home:Essentialism, Labor, Race- and Racist Relativism

Competing Racial Discourses

It was strange to Jake that these Arabs washed themselves after eating and not before [….] Jake was used to the lowest and hardest sort of life, but even his leather-lined stomach could not endure the Arab’s way of eating. Jake also began to despise the Arabs[….]

One of the sailor flattered Jake. “You’re the same like us chaps. You ain’t like them dirty jabbering coolies.”

But Jake smile and shook his head in a non-committal way. He knew that if he was just like the white sailors, he might have signed on as a deckhand and not a stoker.”

Jake though how strange it was to hear an Englishman say “darky” without being offended. Back home he would have been spoiling for a fight. There he would have hear “nigger” than “darky,” for he knew that when a Yankee said “nigger” he meant hatred for Negroes, whereas when he said “darky” he meant friendly contempt. He preferred white folks hatred to their friendly contempt.

Talking Points• unworkable integrations• geographically based race

relativism• internalized racial essentialisma) race as a specialized form of class

division

Going Back HomeRethinking Race, Place, and Relativism in Exile

Going Back HomeRethinking Race, Place, and Relativism in Exile

And when it was all over he was seized with the awful fever of lonesomeness. He felt all alone in the world. He wanted to run away from the kind-heartedness of his lady of the East End.

“Why did I ever enlist and come over here?” He asked himself. “Why did I want to mix mahself up in a white folks war? It ain’t ever was any of black folks affair [….] Always thinking they’ve got something to do with white folks’ business.”

Jake’s woman could do nothing to please him now. She had tried to get down in his thoughts and share them with him. But for Jake this woman was now only a creature of another race—of another world. He brooded day and night. It was two years since he had left Harlem. Fifth Avenue, Lenox Avenue, and one hundred and Thirty-fifth Street, with their chocolate-brown and walnut-brown girls, were calling him [….] “Harlem for mine” cried Jake. “I was thinkin I was happy over heah. I wasn’t mahself […] “Take me home to Harlem, Mister Ship!”