Holcomb to give reading in New York honoring 'McKay Day'
Special to The Gazette
Thursday, August 30, 2007
A celebration of Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay at New York’s Schomburg Center will include a reading by Emporia State University professor Gary Holcomb.
Holcomb will read from his new book “Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance” as part of the McKay Day celebration on Sept. 15 at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The University Press of Florida, which announced the event, referred to McKay as “one of the most perplexing, unclassifiable, and fascinating personas of the Harlem Renaissance.”
In his lifetime McKay authored such books as the Jazz Age bestseller “Home to Harlem,” the manifesto “Banjo,” and “Romance in Marseille,” conceivably the most significant early black diaspora novel, and never published during the author’s lifetime.
For two decades, the FBI and U.S. State Department, as well as British, French, and colonial law enforcement, took turns harassing McKay. A gay, Marxist, Jamaican expatriate writer of the Harlem Renaissance, McKay left the United States to live in Europe and North Africa, with a lengthy sojourn in Soviet Russia, during most of the movement. It was in Russia where he adopted the code name “Sasha.”
Much of what has been written about McKay focuses on his blackness as the single factor that permeated his work. According to the University Press of Florida, “Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha” is the first book to address the multilayered “queer black anarchism” in McKay’s writings from a literary, cultural, and historical perspective. Holcomb is the first critic to assess the importance of “Romance in Marseille” and also examined McKay’s extensive FBI file and his late-1930s autobiography, “A Long Way from Home,” in which McKay disguised his past as a means of eluding his harassers.
John Carlos Rowe, associate chair in humanities at the University of Southern California, called Holcomb’s work “an original book on a neglected figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Holcomb is the first scholar to offer a coherent account of the different aspects of McKay’s career and life without treating them as contradictions.”
The Schomburg Center is a research library of the New York Public Library. For more information about the Center, please visit: www.nypl.org/research/sc/sc.html.
McKay Day is open to the public and will take place on Saturday, September 15th at 6pm at the Schomburg Center located at 515 Malcolm X Boulevard on 135th Street in New York City.