Jack’s Search For Black Identity In Home To Harlem

Claude McKay was a nonnegligible black writer during the Harlem Renaissance. As an immigrant from Jamaica, an island country in the Caribbean Sea, he was firstly acknowledged as a poet and later a novelist. His first and most celebrated novel Home to Harlem is claimed as the first Afro-American "best seller" and wins the Harmon Gold Award for Literature. Most critics have studied this novel by analyzing blacks’being marginalized and the vigorous side of blacks and their culture from the historical and cultural perspectives. However, studies on Jack’s pursuit of black identity are not that adequate. By applying the identity construction theory of post-colonialism, the thesis attempts to probe into the protagonist Jack’s journey of searching for his black identity.Home to Harlem primarily narrates how Jack, a black wanderer, survives and pursues his black identity in the white world where racial discrimination is particularly prevalent. The process of Jack’s search for black identity is dynamic and arduous. From his initial innocence to subsequent realization of otherness, Jack is awakened by the racial discrimination from Europeans and begins to identify himself with Harlem and his black compatriots. After his arrival in Harlem, the temporary comfort Jack harvests from black music and love convinces him that Harlem is exactly where he belongs. However, having found him alienated from the black community represented by his friend Ray and Zeddy, Jack is disillusioned for he is unable to equate him with his black community. Jack’s identity construction in Harlem ends in failure, so he is compelled to leave for Chicago to continue his search for identity on the road.As a representative of the black race, Jack goes through arduousness to search for his black identity. Apart from holding fast to black culture and traditions, Jack has to place him in the surrounding environment and see clearly the interracial and intraracial relationship in order to position himself correctly. In essence, Jack’s pursuit for black identity in Home to Harlem bears a significant meaning for minorities living in the white world and facing existential dilemma.