Bøger af Claude McKay

Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (1920) is a poetry collection by Claude McKay. Published toward the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems is the first of McKay¿s collections to appear in the United States. As a committed leftist, McKay¿who grew up in Jamaicäcaptures the life of African Americans from a realist¿s point of view, lamenting their exposure to poverty, racism, and violence while celebrating their resilience and cultural achievement. Several years before T. S. Eliot¿s The Waste Land (1922) and William Carlos Williams¿ Spring and All (1923), modernist poet Claude McKay troubles the traditional symbol of springtime to accommodate the hardships of an increasingly industrialized world. In ¿Spring in New Hampshire,¿ the poet gives voice to a desperate laborer, for whom the beauty and harmony of the season of rebirth are not only sickening, but altogether inaccessible: ¿Too green the springing April grass, / Too blue the silver-speckled sky, / For me to linger here, alas, / While happy winds go laughing by, / Wasting the golden hours indoors, / Washing windows and scrubbing floors.¿ A master of traditional forms, McKay brings his experience as a black man to bear on a poem otherwise dedicated to descriptions of natural beauty, challenging the very tradition his language and style invoke. In ¿The Lynching,¿ he calls on the reader to witness the brutality of American racism while exposing the complicity of those who would look without feeling: ¿[S]oon the mixed crowds came to view / The ghastly body swaying in the sun: / The women thronged to look, but never a one / Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue¿¿ As children dance around the victim¿s body, ¿lynchers that were to be,¿ McKay raises a terrible, timeless question: how long will such violence endure? With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Claude McKay¿s Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems is a classic of Jamaican literature reimagined for modern readers.

A harbinger of the Harlem Renaissance first published in 1922, this collection of poignant, lyrical poems explores Claude McKay's yearning for his Jamaican homeland and the bitter plight of Black and African Caribbean people in America-now with an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown. With pure heart, passion, and honesty, Claude McKay offers an acute reflection on the complex nature of racial identity in the Caribbean diaspora, encompassing issues such as nationalism, freedom of expression, class, gender, and sex. The collection's eponymous poem, "Harlem Shadows," portrays the struggle of sex workers in 1920s Harlem. In "If We Must Die," McKay calls for justice and retribution for Black people in the face of racist abuse. Juxtaposing the cacophony of New York City with the serene beauty of Jamaica, McKay urges us to reckon with the oppression that plagues a "long-suffering race," who he argues has no home in a white man's world. Poems of Blackness, queerness, desire, performance, and love are infused with a radical message of resistance in this sonorous cry for universal human rights. Simultaneously a love letter to the spirit of New York City and an indictment of its harsh cruelty, Harlem Shadows is a stunning collection that remains all too relevant one hundred years after its original publication.

The pioneering novel of physical disability, transatlantic travel, and black international politics. A vital document of black modernism and one of the earliest overtly queer fictions in the African American tradition. Published for the first time.A Penguin ClassicA New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice/Staff PickBuried in the archive for almost ninety years, Claude McKay's Romance in Marseille traces the adventures of a rowdy troupe of dockworkers, prostitutes, and political organizers--collectively straight and queer, disabled and able-bodied, African, European, Caribbean, and American. Set largely in the culture-blending Vieux Port of Marseille at the height of the Jazz Age, the novel takes flight along with Lafala, an acutely disabled but abruptly wealthy West African sailor. While stowing away on a transatlantic freighter, Lafala is discovered and locked in a frigid closet. Badly frostbitten by the time the boat docks, the once-nimble dancer loses both of his lower legs, emerging from life-saving surgery as what he terms "an amputated man." Thanks to an improbably successful lawsuit against the shipping line, however, Lafala scores big in the litigious United States. Feeling flush after his legal payout, Lafala doubles back to Marseille and resumes his trans-African affair with Aslima, a Moroccan courtesan. With its scenes of black bodies fighting for pleasure and liberty even when stolen, shipped, and sold for parts, McKay's novel explores the heritage of slavery amid an unforgiving modern economy. This first-ever edition of Romance in Marseille includes an introduction by McKay scholars Gary Edward Holcomb and William J. Maxwell that places the novel within both the "stowaway era" of black cultural politics and McKay's challenging career as a star and skeptic of the Harlem Renaissance.

This is a full-length novel written by Claude McKay in 1933-34, in the same key as the episodic "Banjo", but for which he was never able to find a publisher. Richard Bradbury, who discovered the manuscript in New York, provides a critical introduction.

An autobiography that explains what it means to be a black ""rebel sojourner"" and presents the exposes of the Harlem Renaissance. This book challenges readers to rethink the author's articulation of identity, art, race, and politics and situate these topics in terms of his oeuvre and his literary contemporaries between the World Wars.

The complete works of previously unpublished and published poetry of a pioneer of modern black writing

A novel that gives voice to the alienation and frustration of urban blacks during an era when Harlem was in vogue