"[T]he happiest, well-feddest wolf in Harlem": Asexuality as Resistance to Social Reproduction in Claude McKay's Home to Harlem

Abstract

This article argues that in Claude McKay's 1928 Harlem Renaissance novel Home to Harlem, the character Billy Biasse, whom most contemporary scholarship has read as experiencing same sex sexual attraction, can actually be read as asexual. Such a reading does not merely serve to recover a potentially lost asexual literary character, but also allows a new interpretation of the novel as one that represents what I term Black Ace politics, or resistance to the foundational element of capitalism that is social reproduction, and in particular reproductive commodities. Specifically, in the environment of Harlem, Black bodies become machinic commodities within capitalism, and are meant to reproduce with their labor other commodities for purchase, and with their sexuality more Black bodies to perpetuate the cycle. Billy, through resisting the commodification of physical intimacy into sex work, resists the entire capitalistic system and presents a metaphoric path to the escape from capitalism. This resistance represents a version of Lordean erotics, as Billy inspires other characters not to settle for commodified versions of romance and sexuality, and also serves as a similar uplifting message for readers that their own satisfaction need not be accountable to anyone else's idea of what it should look like.