CLAUDE MCKAY: MAN AND SYMBOL OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE, 1889--1948

Undoubtably, the decade of the 1920's was one of the most active and exciting periods in Afro-American history. Seeking to break the fetters which had contained their creative talents, Afro-Americans embarked upon a journey of conscious culture building. While intellectuals and critics often differed and quarreled over style, subject matter and philosophy, all agreed that an unprecedented opportunity for blacks to articulate the Afro-American experience was at hand.;But despite the attention the Renaissance received during its heyday and the subsequent treatment by scholars, a ring of obfuscation and superficiality surrounds any discussion of the decade, and the characterization of its participants. Claude McKay, more than any of the Renaissance figures exemplifys this paradox. Generally accepted as the personification of those writers who led a successful revolt against the sanctimonious treatment of the Afro-American, and one of the most important social critics of his day, McKay, the man, apart from his literature remains elusive. Often he emerges less as a complicated soul with frustrations, ambivalences and contradictions than as a stereotypical one dimensional character, largely distilled from his literature.;The object of this study is to free McKay of the constraints of literary generalizing and observe the influences of his real life on his relationship to literature, the world, and his role as a social critic. To get at the heart of McKay, the man, attention has been given to the abundance of his unpublished manuscripts and correspondence. What emerges is not simply McKay the playboy of the Renaissance, the outsider, the proletarian artist, political radical or the desperate soul who surrendered in the end to Catholicism to resolve the intolerable tensions of Western decadence and Jamaican peasantry. He was a complex man, full of ambivalences and tensions: a black Jamaican in America; a black Jamaican in Harlem; a black Jamaican representing Afro-Americans in Europe and Russia; a black drawn to whites and radicalism and at the same time repulsed by these people. Similarly, there was the ambivalence of a black drawn to blacks but whose cultural and intellectual heritage drew him away from them. And finally, McKay was a man who strove for the non-racial universal qualities in life.;Such optimism resulted in one of the most productive periods for blacks since their introduction to this country. In the fields of poetry, prose, comedy and the theater, blacks and whites alike discovered, rediscovered, and reevaluated the who span of black thought and culture. From the treatment of intra-racial conflict, the inhibited lifestyle of the middle class, to the rough and expressive lifestyle of the lower class, black artists left no facet of black life untouched. Underpinning all of this was the belief that Afro-Americans possessed a vast storehouse of indigenous material which would contribute to the whole of American arts and letters.