Black Marxist Research Articles

Hortense Spillers and the Ungendering of (Re)productive Racial Capitalism

Abstract This article theorizes the reproductive dimensions of racial capitalism. It begins by bringing into conversation Black Marxist theories of racial capitalism and Marxist feminist theories of social and biological reproduction proffered by Cedric Robinson and Silvia Federici respectively. It demonstrates that since its inception, racial capitalism has depended on processes of racialized (re)productive accumulation that are ongoing but not yet fully theorized. At the center of the essay is a close reading of Hortense Spillers’s 1987 contribution “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Though Spillers is not generally regarded as either a Black Marxist or a Marxist feminist, the essay argues that she ought to be recognized as a theorist of racialized (re)productive accumulation—a process that begins aboard the slave ship, persists on the plantation, and endures into the present. Racialized (re)productive accumulation exploited she whom Spillers often denotes as “the captive female,” and, also, paradoxically, ungendered her. Ultimately, through examination of the process of ungendering in Atlantic slavery, the essay suggests that Spillers opens up new ways to think about the history of racial capitalism, (re)productive dispossession, and the possibility of its refusal. The article concludes by considering how Spillers’s complex insights about the process of ungendering might yet be mobilized to secure truly substantive forms of reproductive justice.

Racism and State Formation in the Age of Absolutism

Abstract This essay explores four questions through a critical dialogue with Black Marxist, Decolonial, and Political Marxist accounts of racism. First, is it possible to speak of racism before the advent of colonisation in the Americas? Second, what were the determinants for the production of these earlier modalities of racism? Third, who were the key actors responsible for the production of such racism? And fourth, what were the linkages between these developments and racisms that would unfold with the capitalist colonisation of the Americas? I contend that the historical formation of racism as a material force lies in the formation and dissolution of absolutist states in Western Europe between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. By demonstrating how elite political cultures of Western European societies were suffused with the logic of racialisation prior to the colonisation of the Americas, the essay helps render transparent hitherto occluded connections between histories focusing on the internal racialisation of Europe and the racialisation of the European exterior. And in doing so, it establishes the constitutive part racism played in the emergence of capitalist modernity.

Ghana and Nkrumah Revisited: Lenin, State Capitalism, and Black Marxist Orbits

AbstractThis paper reexamines African socialism, the Ghanaian political economy under Kwame Nkrumah (1957–1966), Nkrumah’s intellectual genealogical heritage, and African intellectual history as a genre that transcends the bounds of the Atlantic world. First, I sketch the lives of Black Marxists—Nkrumah, C.L.R. James, George Padmore, and Bankole Awoonor-Renner—from Africa and the Americas, to the Soviet Union, to England and Ghana, to rethink Black bodies not merely as theorists of racial and decolonial questions but also as sites, carriers, and manipulators of political-economic theories. In constructing connected and overlapping histories, I demonstrate how controversial and contested Soviet ideas became key sites of interrogation among global Black Marxists. By reframing travel as an intellectual process, I reconceptualize the movements of Black Marxists to the USSR, the United States, England, and Ghana as critical intellectual and historical processes in their understandings of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas. Second, I revisit the Ghanaian political economy under Nkrumah to argue that combining socialist and capitalist development paths was not a contradictory Marxian policy but was embedded within Black Marxist understandings of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas. In so doing, I argue that we must situate African political ideologies not solely within a romanticized Afrocentric origin but as ideas that emerge out of contemporaneous global political and ideological struggles. I draw on global Black Marxists’ correspondence; newspaper and magazine articles; British and American espionage files; and Ghanaian, American, and British state and inter-state departmental documents in imperial, colonial, and postcolonial British, Ghanaian, American, and Russian archives.

The Poetry of a Prison Uprising

The Poetry of a Prison Uprising Elias Rodriques (bio) When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal ed. by Celes Tisdale Duke University Press, 2022, pp. 152 Click for larger view View full resolution Prisoners in Attica on September 10, 1971 (Bettmann/Getty Images) [End Page 100] The story of Attica could be said to begin in 1929, when uprisings at Dannemora and Auburn prisons captivated New York state. Conditions at the prisons (including overcrowding, low wages, and more), rebellions in response to those conditions, and assaults on prisoners by police and armed citizens occasioned a visit from Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt. "The time has come," Roosevelt said after visiting Dannemora and nearby Great Meadow Prison, "when New York can no longer tolerate prisons like Dannemora and Auburn." In the wake of the prisoners taking control of their facilities and of governmental outcry, the state did not demolish either prison (both are still operational today). Instead, it built a new facility: Attica. From its opening in 1931, Attica showed signs of what was to come. Fifteen days after the prison began operations, Jesse Conklin, incarcerated for forgery, became the first person to escape. A year and a half later, in December 1932, the first uprising occurred. According to the warden at the time, it was caused in part by "a strong distaste among certain . . . convicts for pick and shovel work." If there was a "distaste" for labor, the events of the following decades suggest that the prisoners resented their work because of the way the prison denigrated its laborers. During that time, according to the critic Mark Nowak, people incarcerated at Attica participated in strikes and protests (such as the "sour milk sit-down strike"), lawsuits (including more than a hundred complaints filed by Black Muslims demanding religious freedom), and even, in 1962, a sit-in coordinated across four New York prisons. Using political protests and labor actions, people incarcerated at Attica fought for better work conditions, for their rights, and for their liberation. They were not the lazy laborers whom the warden suggested deserved the punishment they received; they were workers and people who could and did resist the institution's dehumanization. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that such a politically active group responded forcefully to the killing of the Black Marxist George Jackson, a prisoner at San Quentin, in August 1971. On September 9, 1,300 prisoners took control of Attica. Governing themselves through representative democracy, they drafted a list of demands, which included minimum-wage payment for their forced labor, an end to the censorship of reading materials, and an expansion of the prison's education system. After four days, armed forces stormed the prison, resulting in the deaths of thirty-two prisoners and eleven hostages. Though the assault by the state brought an end to the prisoners' self-governance, [End Page 101] those who survived did see one of their efforts come to fruition in the form of a poetry workshop that started in 1972, led by Celes Tisdale, a professor at SUNY Buffalo. Tisdale's new book, When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal, collects poems by his students in that workshop and his journal entries from the period. Some of the work was originally published in Tisdale's 1974 book Betcha Ain't, but the new volume also includes never-before-published poems, Tisdale's class handouts, and more. When the Smoke Cleared, accordingly, reveals a great deal about survival in the wake of state violence and about the uses of prison education. ______ On the first day of the course (which was funded in part by a nonprofit and in part by the state), Tisdale was not so much concerned with the curriculum as anxious about what would happen. He wrote in his journal, "Many times have I basked in the glory of applause, adulation, recognition as I interpreted the Black poet masters. But, today, I wait in painful/joyful anticipation of meeting those humanity-scarred men who must express themselves or perish from anonymity." In the hours that followed, he met his workshop participants, some of whom he recognized from the neighborhood where he grew up, in nearby Buffalo...

A Black Construction of Colonialism: The Black Marxist Response to Fascism in the 1930s

This article aims to understand why Black Marxists and white Marxists had different theoretical and practical responses to 1930s fascism. I argue this stemmed from different conceptualizations of colonialism. Following Marx and Lenin, many white Marxists viewed colonialism as an imperial extension of capitalist conditions from western Europe to non-Europe. In contrast, Black Marxists viewed colonialism as the site of capitalism and race: the practicing of white dominance and capital accumulation through territorial dispossession, material extraction, and forced labor in the colonies. Black Marxists understood fascism as extending these racial-colonial practices into Europe, while white Marxists failed to see this because of their foreclosure of race. In viewing fascism as primarily a threat to the spread of European communism, the Soviet Union made anti-fascism a priority exceeding anti-colonialism. The interwar Black Left therefore produced a more expansive conception of colonialism, widening the spatial and temporal horizons upon which to understand the emergence of fascism and remain committed to anti-colonialism.

‘The human ocean of the colored races’: interwar Black internationalism, Marxism, and permanent revolution

ABSTRACT In the international Communist movement after the Russian Revolution, Black radical opponents of racism, colonialism, and capitalism entered a productive dialogue with European socialist revolutionism. This tradition was itself shaped by decades of theoretical disagreement around the relationship between historical development and socialist revolution. Common to the leading figures of Europe’s revolutionary Left (Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky) was an emphasis on the uninterrupted continuity of democratic and socialist revolutions in the epoch of imperialism. ‘Permanent revolution’ became a phrase associated exclusively with Trotskyists, but many Communists in different traditions professed affiliation with a flexible and revolutionary version of Marxism. As such, though the language of uninterrupted or permanent revolution was often absent from Black Marxist writing in the 1920s and 1930s, writers such as Claude McKay, Grace Campbell, C.L.R. James, and W.E.B. Du Bois articulated Marxist perspectives on Black oppression that similarly transcended rigid and economist versions of Marxism. Their additional emphasis was on the vanguard role of anticolonial radicals in the world revolution. As Black internationalists appropriated Marxism, they deployed a logic that helps to connect revolutionary theory in Europe with the intellectual work of radical Black internationalists.

Deporting black radicalism: Claudia Jones' deportation and policing blackness in the cold war

This article looks at the relationship between Claudia Jones, the pioneering black Marxist feminist, and the border regime of the United States. The article makes the case that Jones' denial of citizenship, legal harassment, and later expulsion was not merely a product of the transgression of the restrictive Cold War limitation of freedom of speech but instead concretely related to her Blackness. Jones is placed as a key figure in challenging the economic determinism within party thought, placing emphasis on her as a trailblazer in position racial oppression as a form of racialised social control which transcended a purely-economic basis. This was a form of social control that political and economic elites exploited to control working-class and minority populations and prevent working-class unity. Her involuntary bordercrossing experiences are shown to reveal how anticommunism, white supremacy, and gender-based oppression cohered in post-war America, shaping Jones' ideas which would challenge fellow communists on both sides of the Atlantic.

Charles Mills’s Liberal Redemption Song

Charles Mills’s Liberal Redemption Song

Black Intellectual Thought in Modern America: A Historical Perspective ed. by Brian D. Behnken, Gregory D. Smithers, and Simon Wendt

Reviewed by: Black Intellectual Thought in Modern America: A Historical Perspective ed. by Brian D. Behnken, Gregory D. Smithers, and Simon Wendt Brandy Thomas Wells Black Intellectual Thought in Modern America: A Historical Perspective. Edited by Brian D. Behnken, Gregory D. Smithers, and Simon Wendt. Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Pp. vi, 244. $65.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-1365-7.) Black Intellectual Thought in Modern America: A Historical Perspective joins a reinvigorated conversation about black intellectuals and their complex range of ideas. This interdisciplinary book moves beyond the common discussion of popular liberals, who are most visible during frenzied moments, to the margins, where radical, feminist, Marxist, and conservative black intellectuals have largely been cast. Expanding the theoretical and historical underpinnings of black intellectualism, the volume aims to "complicate how black intellectualism is academically and popularly understood" (p. 9). Gregory D. Smithers opens the text with an overview of black intellectual thought from the late eighteenth century to World War II. Smithers explains that from the 1800s, black intellectualism was rooted in Christianity, abolitionism, and liberal ideas, broadly defined. This tradition was joined by other forms of thinking, including black Marxism and black feminism. As black intellectuals sought to mitigate the complexities of race and racism and to accomplish their own aspirations, they remained a diverse and complex group. In providing readers with "a genealogy of black Marxism," Minkah Makalani challenges a discussion that has often been limited to the Communist Party of the United States during the Cold War (p. 38). After providing a rich historiography of black Marxist writing and thought, Makalani follows Frantz Fanon in stretching the definition of Marxism to make room for discourses on coloniality. Readers are introduced to Amílcar Cabral, whose thinking did not stop at imperialism but also addressed cultural revolution. Makalani closes the essay by considering the abandonment of this cultural nationalism in the sectarian turn in U.S. black Marxism. Brian D. Behnken's essay broadly considers black liberalism. Behnken grants attention to the life work of James W. C. Pennington, Carter G. Woodson, and Marion Thompson Wright, since scholarly activity was considered the best means of changing white perspectives. If black liberals' desires could be summarized as possessing a singular goal, Behnken makes clear that "racial change was it" (p. 81). Even so, Behnken rightly shows that black liberalism has undergone many iterations and defies neat categorization. Danielle L. Wiggins provides what could be called a companion essay to the preceding chapter. Correcting a false view that the black conservative tradition began after the civil rights era, Wiggins uncovers a "conservative radicalism" from the time of seventeenth-century black thinkers (p. 111). Although the number of black conservatives declined during the New Deal, Wiggins shows that this intellectual tradition remained deeply rooted. In the 1970s and 1980s, black neoconservatives "united in a shared critique of American liberalism and [End Page 493] the active role of the state" in black life (p. 115). Though marginally accepted among the New Right, black neoconservatives have shaped the parameters of discussions of black culture, education, welfare, and affirmative action. In an enthralling essay, Benita Roth turns her attention to black feminist intellectuals. She examines the views and arguments of black women communists concerning the triple exploitation faced by black women. The arguments of Claudia Jones and others were resurrected in the 1950s and 1960s, as black feminist scholars, through writing and organization, challenged racial and gender oppressions. In weighing Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw's recognition of intersectionality, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the need for a "Say Her Name" campaign, Roth well articulates that no matter how consistent this intellectual tradition has been, many black feminists have been rendered invisible, as if there is only room for a few luminaries at once. Simon Wendt analyzes black nationalist thought from the 1950s through the 1990s by paying attention to black "paraintellectuals," thinkers who reached larger audiences by speaking and writing about black politics from their lived rather than learned experiences (p. 171). This contribution highlights the predicaments and complexities of these thinkers, who attempted to create postcolonial ideologies that were inextricably linked to Anglo...

The Politically Unimaginable in Black Marxist Thought

The Politically Unimaginable in Black Marxist Thought

Langston Unashamed: Radical Mythmaking in Hughes’s 1930s Short Fiction

This essay contextualizes several of Langston Hughes’s mid-1930s short fiction works, exploring ways in which these Black Marxist writings expose racism as a function of an absolutist US nationalist discourse. The essay argues that the short story “Cora Unashamed” is a crucial document of interwar period African American internationalist literature, as it imparts a black modernist fable that rearticulates the realist folklore of the 1930s Left. The article then considers several stories that carry on the radical socialist theme, including “The Blues I’m Playing,” “Little Old Spy,” “Why, You Reckon?”, “On the Road,” “Professor,” “Gumption,” and “The Trouble with Angels.”

Introduction: Red on Black Marxist Encounters with Anarchism

Science & Society is an interdisciplinary journal of and for Marxist scholars. In this special issue, we have assembled some studies of anarchist movements, theorists, and practices, primarily in contemporary or late–20th-century struggles. The articles are mostly exploratory rather than polemical, but there is a tonal continuum stretching from the firmly conclusive arms folded to the open, outstretched hand. A number of our contributors were active in the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and related movements that crested in the year before our call for papers was released, in October 2012. This introductory essay will offer, in brief, an attempt to show some of the theoretical concerns interweaving through these pieces. It is a “conversation,” and not merely a confrontation, in the pages of this issue, at least: most of our writers do not simply reject anarchism but challenge and probe with some degree of sympathy. Indeed, one of our contributors claims allegiance to both Marxism and anarchism. Robert Paul Wolff argues in his brief communication that his commitment to a Marxist program of collective action does not in the least require him to affirm the de jure legitimacy of any state, even a socialist one — and it is this he rejects. Wolff’s philosophical anarchism starts in an insistence on the moral autonomy of the human individual, and entails, he thinks, the denial of the legitimacy of any political authority. Here, in its pure, abstract form, is theoretical anarchism’s anti-statism, its preoccupation with autonomy (and, one might add, that preoccupation’s abstract — not to say bourgeois — individualism). That preoccupation leaves the lecture hall for the streets in autonomism, the subject of Linda and Jose Alcoff’s critical conspectus included here. Identified as anarchist by Marxists and as Marxist by anarchists, autonomism, in the Alcoffs’ presentation, grew out of an early 20th-century “anti-authoritarian

Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance (review)

Reviewed by: Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance J. Gosciak, Independent Scholar Gary Edward Holcomb . Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2007. 288 pp. $59.95. I propose that we view the whole of American life as a drama acted upon the body of the Negro giant, who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon which and within which the action unfolds. —Ralph Ellison (1946) Iwouldn't exactly say that we have another trussed-up Guilliver in Gary Edward Holcomb's Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance, but we do come perilously close to dicing that body beyond recognition in a bold bid at academic correctness. So I suggest we revisit the terrifying times of which Ellison wrote, and McKay lived through beyond our own post-historical gloss, to get a real sense of the power of words to segregate, stigmatize, devalue, and demean; where normative (white) ideologies prevailed and art seldom if ever jibed with black reality. It was a world, Ellison reminds us, calculatedly "drained of humanity" and significantly, for us today, black authorial presence. "For if the word has the potency to revive and make us free," Ellison cautioned, "it has the power to blind, imprison, and destroy." Particularly to the academic scholar who says this is my reality, my interpretation, my politics, whether right or left, Ellison counters, "Perhaps, but you've left out this, and this. And this. And most of all, what you'd have the world accept as me isn't even human." Despite the adventurous, provocative thesis at play in Code Name Sasha, one needs to ask, is it really the me of McKay? The problem, of course, is who speaks for whom, who has that authorial privilege, and how should those assertions be interpreted, then re-interpreted, against changing tastes, attitudes, contexts. Much like race leaders William Brawley, W. E. B. Du Bois, and later scholars of the 1960s and 1970s such as Harold Cruse and Addison Gayle, Holcomb attempts to assert authorial limits and, in essence speak for and through a trussed-up racial giant. In the African American literary tradition, this is sometimes known as "imprimaturing." Scholars continually imprimatur texts that they deem worthy, as they reassess, reinterpret, and ultimately speak for an age or era as interlocutors. We do this to make sense of literary and arcane modes of expression for contemporary audiences—and it is done sincerely. Yet when we alter authorial intention in our interpretations, as scholars invariably do, we occasionally devalue and dehumanize when we mean to elevate and particularize. Such is the problem with Holcomb's recuperative queer black Marxist reading of McKay's three novels, Home to Harlem, Banjo, and Romance in Marseille. For Holcomb's thesis to unfold [End Page 762] correctly, a Marxist queer reading of McKay must reject—or justify—the McKay who continually resists the imprimaturing process. To get at the queer McKay, Holcomb pinpoints a key text, the autobiography A Long Way from Home (1937), which expresses the author's views about politics, culture, race, and sexuality. He calls this an "autobiographical performance," and one of questionable merit since it reflects too much of McKay's later anti-Communism. As a supplement, Holcomb turns to the FBI dossier that was compiled from 1922-24 as "a more dependable portrayal" of the author's queer Marxist credentials (though I don't see the connection, since the file contains only one inference of McKay's homosexuality and that passage is deleted). "McKay's 1937 memoir is in fact a creative, playful—if fatally serious—invention," Holcomb then explains, a text that ultimately undercuts its own authenticity (32-33). A Long Way from Home can finally be viewed as a "queer black anarchist communiqué," one written "undercover" as a "counter-dossier" to the official but censored government record compiled meticulously by the FBI. This counterattacking McKay is for Holcomb, and for most of us whose work involves racial/political recuperation, the preferred, politically expedient McKay. Read as an inauthentic anti-Communist foil to the...

From Black Marxism to Industrial Ecosystem: Racial and Ecological Crisis in William Attaway's Blood on the Forge

From Black Marxism to Industrial Ecosystem:Racial and Ecological Crisis in William Attaway's Blood on the Forge John Claborn (bio) Known for its tragic portrayal of the early-twentieth-century Great Migration, William Attaway's 1941 novel Blood on the Forge follows in the naturalist and black Marxist tradition of Richard Wright's Native Son (1940). As critic Philip H. Vaughan rightly assesses, one of the novel's central conflicts is the "clash between pastoral and industrial-urban living" (424) as it "becomes an angry repudiation of industrial life as destructive to human values" (422). Employing both naturalism and pastoralism to dramatize this clash, Attaway curiously breaks out of these two representational modes through his use of a relatively minor secondary character named Smothers, a prophetic spokesman for the earth's pain: "[o]ne of the men whispered that Smothers was off his nut. Yet they listened and heard a different sort of tale: 'It's wrong to tear up the ground and melt it up in the furnace. Ground don't like it. It's the hell-and-devil kind of work'" (52–53). His legs dismembered in a brutal steel mill accident, Smothers's shrill prophecies are the product of wisdom gained through suffering, of a heightened sense of what the ground feels as it is mined, smelted, [End Page 566] and made into steel. Because he brings an ecological perspective to the ethical and ontological relations among worker, machine, and earth, his character appears on the literary scene as an enigma not only for the Great Migration narrative, but also, perhaps, all of early-twentieth century African American literature. This article explores this strange anomaly of Smothers and the ecological themes of Blood on the Forge. Literary critics have acknowledged the importance of Smothers for articulating the novel's twin themes of machinic violence performed on worker and land. Edward Margolies goes the furthest in this direction when he conflates Smothers's worldview with Attaway's, arguing that the novel condemns "a kind of greed that manifests itself as a violence to the land, a transgression of Nature" (xiv). Yet no critic has fully explored its ecological themes, nor asked why a novel published in 1941 and set in 1919 should so strongly anticipate the various environmentalist movements that hit mainstream American cultural and political discourse in the 1960s. Perhaps this marginalization is due partly to the novel's critical reception and classification as African American fiction, a category typically perceived as tackling social injustices rather than environmental causes.1 Alan Wald reads the novel within the political context of the late 1930s, calling Attaway a black Marxist "whose exertions were aimed in part at educating the white labor movement about the corrosive costs of continued racial chauvinism" (282). Wald cites Attaway's involvement with the Communist Party as evidence for his strong political commitments, though Blood on the Forge reveals more an analyst of race and capitalism than a propagandist supplying cultural weapons for an American October Revolution. We never see in Blood on the Forge the triumph of racial accommodation and assimilation, or the awakening of class consciousness. Set in 1919, when World War I had cut off migratory flows from Europe and thus depleted the pool of cheap immigrant labor in northern industrial cities, the novel follows the three Moss brothers—Big Mat, Chinatown, and Melody—as they migrate from the Jim Crow South to the industrial wasteland of western Pennsylvania. As historian Carole Marks pinpoints in her analysis of the Great Migration, northern steel mill employers saw that if they could maintain the influx of racially diverse labor, they could rely on perpetual conflict to undermine organized labor (15). The narrative ends tragically with one brother dead, another blinded by a mill explosion, and the third with an injured hand that prevents him from "slick[ing] away" his blues on the guitar (1). The two surviving brothers catch a train ride farther north to Pittsburgh proper, each feeling uncertain about his future. Attaway's protest is bleak, even nihilistic, but it does testify [End Page 567] to the singular experience of workers who might otherwise be lost in a Chicago School sociologist...

Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance

Reviewed by: Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance John Claborn (bio) Holcomb, Gary Edward . Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2007. Its title evocative of a Cold War era spy film, Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha argues that the Jamaican poet and novelist fashioned himself in the interwar years as the "deepest mole, a diaspora undercover agent of queer black Marxism" (15). Sasha was the secret name McKay adopted upon his tour of the Soviet Union in 1922 in order to duck FBI investigators, who suspected him of proselytizing Bolshevik propaganda in the United States. Contrary to popular scholarly belief, McKay's life as Sasha—as a subversive queer black Marxist—extended well into the late 1930s when he wrote his allegedly anti-communist memoir, A Long Way from Home (1937). Code Name links McKay's hitherto critically unexamined sexuality to his Marxist politics, contending that the "quest for Comrade Claude is the pursuit of queer Sasha" (53). Suppressed in the 1940s and 50s, McKay's now highly anthologized sonnets were first recovered by the Black Arts movement for their Black Nationalist sentiments. Recent critical recovery work on McKay, however, has emphasized his status as an international writer, venturing beyond the militant sonnets and into the rich totality of his oeuvre. Holcomb's book takes the work of Heather Hathaway, Brent Hayes Edwards, William J. Maxwell, and McKay biographer Wayne F. Cooper1 in new directions. Code Name paints the Caribbean vagabond—most often considered a progenitor of the Harlem Renaissance and destabilizer of the traditional sonnet form—as perhaps the prototype of twentieth-century queer black diasporic writers, a figure as much politically as geographically mobile. Central to Holcomb's book is the question of where to locate McKay as a political figure. How does one reconcile the militant black nationalism of the early 1920s sonnets with what Edwards calls the "vagabond internationalism" (187) of such later novels as Banjo (1929)? To answer this complex question nonreductively, Holcomb imports queer theory's concern with identity as a process of becoming rather than a fixed category of being in order to articulate the ménage à trois of queerness, blackness, and Marxism as it develops across McKay's work. For those who know McKay as the progenitor of the Black Arts Movement and the militant, manly sonneteer of "If We Must Die" (1919) and "The Mulatto" [End Page 617] (1925), such a queer reading may seem odd; however, McKay would be considered "bisexual" by clinical standards (12). By nonclinical standards, McKay's queer becoming resists the classificatory schemes of institutional power, just as the word queer in its 1920s usage designates anything outside the norm, beyond the reach of categorization. Given McKay's ambiguous sexual identity and the sheer diversity of work he produced in the late 1920s and 1930s, the militant sonnets are more the exception than the norm. Holcomb amasses an array of archival evidence to support his argument. Most notably, he recovers McKay's long-suppressed FBI file and the unpublished novel Romance in Marseille—works that reveal the author's commitment to Leftist politics and demand we recontextualize McKay's more well-known poetry and prose. The "Harlem Renaissance" in Code Name's subtitle is a bit of a misnomer, for Holcomb shows that the movement and its geographic locale were almost incidental to McKay's queer black Marxism, a mere one-night stand in McKay's "diaspora cruising" (5). This book might be read as a "queering" of the Harlem Renaissance itself—one that releases the movement from its New York locale and sets it adrift in international waters. Hol-comb shows that McKay's internationalism was rooted in multi-localism, a commitment to grassroots activism and a love for the particularities of locations, as his "Cities" poems and titles of his novels attest. Holcomb's queer reading stays faithful to McKay's love for all things local, his cosmopolitan ethos that allowed him to find a "home" anywhere and nowhere. In the introduction, Holcomb argues that McKay's "diasporic itinerary" (1) had a "kind of logic" that traces the...