Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik

by Winston James

Overview

Finalist, Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History, African American Intellectual History Society

Shortlisted, 2023 Historical Nonfiction Legacy Award, Hurston / Wright Foundation

One of the foremost Black writers and intellectuals of his era, Claude McKay (1889–1948) was a central figure in Caribbean literature, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black radical tradition. McKay’s life and writing were defined by his class consciousness and anticolonialism, shaped by his experiences growing up in colonial Jamaica as well as his early career as a writer in Harlem and then London. Dedicated to confronting both racism and capitalist exploitation, he was a critical observer of the Black condition throughout the African diaspora and became a committed Bolshevik.

Winston James offers a revelatory account of McKay’s political and intellectual trajectory from his upbringing in Jamaica through the early years of his literary career and radical activism. In 1912, McKay left Jamaica to study in the United States, never to return. James follows McKay’s time at the Tuskegee Institute and Kansas State University, as he discovered the harshness of American racism, and his move to Harlem, where he encountered the ferment of Black cultural and political movements and figures such as Hubert Harrison and Marcus Garvey. McKay left New York for London, where his commitment to revolutionary socialism deepened, culminating in his transformation from Fabian socialist to Bolshevik.

Drawing on a wide variety of sources, James offers a rich and detailed chronicle of McKay’s life, political evolution, and the historical, political, and intellectual contexts that shaped him.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231135931
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	07/12/2022
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Winston James is the author of A Fierce Hatred of Injustice: Claude McKay’s Jamaica and His Poetry of Rebellion (2000); The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm: The Life and Writings of a Pan-Africanist Pioneer, 1799–1851 (2010); and Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (second edition, 2020), winner of the Gordon K. Lewis Memorial Award for Caribbean Scholarship of the Caribbean Studies Association. He is also coeditor of and contributor to Inside Babylon: The Caribbean Diaspora in Britain (1993). James has held teaching positions in the United Kingdom and the United States, most recently as professor of history at the University of California, Irvine.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Part I: Jamaican Beginnings: The Formation of a Black Fabian, 1889–1912
1. A Son of the Soil: Jamaica’s Claude McKay
2. Holding the Negro in Subjection: Claude McKay’s Jamaica
3. You Caan’ Mek We Shet Up: McKay’s Jamaican Poetry of Rebellion
4. The Man Who Left Jamaica: Claude McKay in 1912
Part II: Coming to America: From Fabianism to Bolshevism, 1912–1919
5. “Six Silent Years”: McKay and America, 1912–1918
6. Fighting Back: Claude McKay and the Crisis of 1919
Part III: England, Their England: McKay’s British Sojourn, 1919–1921
7. English Innings and Left-Wing Communism: McKay’s Bolshevization in Britain
8. Making Spring in New Hampshire, the 1917 Club, Standing Up, and Thinking of England
A Coda
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

05/02/2022

Racism and war propel a pathbreaking Caribbean American writer leftward in this probing biography. James (A Fierce Hatred of Injustice), a University of California Irvine history professor, recaps the early career of Claude McKay (1890–1948), a Jamaican-born writer and Harlem Renaissance luminary who was investigated as a subversive for his sonnet “If We Must Die,” which decried white violence in the 1919 American race riots (“Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,/ Pressed to the wall, dying, but—fighting back!”). James traces McKay’s journey from his youthful Fabian socialism through his radicalization by the harsh racism he encountered in America and the carnage of WWI, and his embrace of the Bolshevik revolution (he visited Russia in 1922 and found “no vulgar wonderment and bounderish superiority over a Negro’s being a poet”) which he saw as the best hope for the oppressed. James grounds insightful analyses of McKay’s poetry in the socioeconomic tensions roiling colonial Jamaica, the intricate cross-currents of contemporary Black nationalist and Marxist politics, and the writer’s variegated experiences of racism, from “the hot-brute hatred of America” to “the sepulchral-cold hostility of the English” during a London sojourn. Elegantly written and carefully reasoned, this is a fascinating look at the political evolution of a key literary figure. Photos. (July)

Publishers Weekly

[I applaud] the nuance, rigor, and commitment that James brings to this fine study of McKay’s early years.

Journal of African American History

Meticulously researched and superbly written, this is the premier work on Claude McKay’s astonishing artistic range and diverse passions. It is also an incisive examination of the wider Jamaican and Caribbean colonial context, and a major contribution to the history of the Atlantic world, the Harlem Renaissance, and the overlooked connection with the founders of Négritude.

Franklin W. Knight Franklin W. Knight

James is a perceptive literary critic, and his close readings are some of the most electrifying parts of The Making of a Black Bolshevik.

Dissent Magazine - Jennifer Wilson

James is the ideal person to author such a work . . . [This] biography makes important interventions.

Radical Americas - Owen Walsh

A compelling and provocative rendering of the complex transnational racial geographies that shaped the remarkable Claude McKay. Winston James illuminates underexplored features of post-emancipation history and, through exhaustive research, dramatizes the deep entanglements between place and psyche, poetry and politics, violence and hope.

Honor Ford-Smith

The revolutionary Jamaican poet Claude McKay deserves a good Marxist biographer and has found one. Winston James’s new book on McKay illuminates the mind and art of one of the most important writers of the early twentieth century as it responded to the seismic contest between capitalism, colonialism, and Socialism in the age of the Russian Revolution.

Tempest Magazine - Bill Mullen

James provides a deep understanding of McKay’s early political formation and radicalization and how these origins structured McKay’s thinking and art. He ably historicizes McKay while retaining a keen sensitivity to McKay’s literary contributions.

Michelle Ann Stephens

Claude McKay goes beyond biography. Although an excellent biography of a pivotal period in McKay's early political education, the book is also an important contribution to scholarship in several other fields . . . Few scholars have been so detailed and sympathetic in their treatment of McKay's early experiences. James has succeeded in effectively demonstrating how McKay's ideology was marked by both continuity and change and has given serious weight to the idea that McKay and his black contemporaries were ahead of their time ideologically.

H-Socialisms - Jasmine Calver

Meticulously researched and superbly written, this is the premier work on Claude McKay’s astonishing artistic range and diverse passions. It is also an incisive examination of the wider Jamaican and Caribbean colonial context, and a major contribution to the history of the Atlantic world, the Harlem Renaissance, and the overlooked connection with the founders of Négritude.

Franklin W. Knight

The wandering poet and revolutionary socialist Claude McKay was one of the twentieth century’s most captivating writers, noted for his intellectual intensity and emotional depth. Combining unparalleled erudition, literary sensitivity, and political nous, Winston James’s book provides a compelling and authoritative account of the life that McKay made and the circumstances within which he made it.

Peter Hulme

Writing with precision and flair and drawing on his own impeccable research, James limns McKay's political life and legacy of influence in American letters . . . Highly recommended.

Choice Reviews - L. L. Johnson

[In] The Making of a Black Bolshevik, McKay properly joins the greats of black America, now accorded his due respect in this scrupulous and thoughtful study. It is a wonderful book, which draws the reader into McKay’s tempestuous world. At every point James’s interpretation is coolly judicious, bringing a lifetime’s thought to fruition.

History Workshop's Radical Reads of 2022

A powerfully relevant study about an iconoclastic Black thinker and poet who was dedicated to economic reform as well as the eradication of racism.

The Arts Fuse - Thomas Filbin

A trenchant and astonishing work. James’ care with details, research, and analysis—along with a pleasurable style of writing—make for a captivating biography of the first part of McKay’s radical life.

People's World - Joel Wendland-Liu

Winston James’s resurrection of the many lives of Claude McKay is a revelation. Page after page, his McKay becomes an increasingly startling figure, never conforming to prevailing expectations. As the narrative gathers pace, McKay shimmers, the life outgrowing the circumstances of his history. The unfolding story presents us with a portrait that is simultaneously compelling and troubling. McKay will never be the same.

Bill Schwarz