Haiti and Black Transnationalism: Remapping the Migrant Geography of Home to Harlem

Abstract

Why did Occupation & Uplift come in? As a capitalistic empire, we needed surplus markets; and lay at our side entrance. Moreover, it fell within the allotted sphere of influence of the National City Bank of New York. history of during the first quarter of the twentieth century is a footnote to the annals of bank. (Clement Wood, The American Uplift in Haiti 189) to ... for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath. (W. E. B. Du Bois, Two Novels 202) June 1928 issue of Crisis featured the second installment of Clement Wood's expose of United States policy in occupied Haiti. His article reflected a renewed African American interest in the brutal hypocrisy of an occupation had already lasted more than a decade. After years of decreasing attention to Haiti, articles denouncing United States policy had begun to reappear with greater frequency in journals such as Nation, Opportunity. Messenger, and Crisis, anticipating the resurgence of widespread strikes and uprisings would take place in the following year. It is ironic, then, the same 1928 issue of Crisis criticized United States imperial policy in also included what become the most notorious book review of Claude McKay's first and most popular novel, Home to Harlem. One would hardly suspect in reading this review by Du Bois McKay's would have such an important impact on anti-imperialist black intellectuals in the Caribbean, West Africa , and Europe. Du Bois castigates McKay for catering to that prurient demand on the part of folk for a portrayal in Negroes of utter licentiousness which conventional civilization holds folk back from enjoying, a demand McKay met amply with his scenes of drunkenness, fighting, lascivious sexual promiscuity and utter absence of restraint. He is quick to point out, however, McKay is too great a poet to write a book is totally worthless. The chief character, he writes, has something appealing, and the glimpses of the Haitian, Ray, have all the materials of a great piece of fiction (202). Yet nothing more is said in this review about the Haitian intellectual whose narrative illustrates the destructive impact of an imperial policy the same issue of Crisis protests. Despite such renewed criticism of the United States occupation of in the later 1920s, the story of a Haitian migrant appears to have little place in a novel about Harlem. Given Du Bois's advocacy of pan-Africanist unity during the 1920s, his exclusive attention to the African American context of Home to might seem surprising. His review, however, represented the response of many African American intellectuals, especially of his generation, who ignored McKay's Haitian protagonist and instead questioned the author's motivation for a book bore a disturbing resemblance to Carl Van Vechten's controversial Nigger Heaven (1926). [1] Most readers of Home to have followed its initial reception by critics, concentrating on McKay's primitivist portrayal of Jake, debating the racial politics of his gritty but romantic depiction of his semi-underworld. [2] I would like to suggest McKay's representation of a transnational black is more politically complex than most accounts of him as a Harlem Renaissance writer indicate. [3] I will concentrate primarily on the cross-cultural dynamic of Home to Harlem's two migrant narratives. first is Jake's African American migrant narrative, which assumes a rural South-urban North geographical trajectory familiar to fiction. Significantly, though, Jake's narrative journey to begins not in his native Virginia but on a trans-Atlantic freighter from London, shortly after he had left the United States Army in France, frustrated by the demeaning treatment of black soldiers who had enlisted to fight in the white folks' war (McKay, Home 8). …