A Long Way From Home.pdf - Site de Thomas - Free

introduction • xxxv
Notes
1. I borrow the term “rebel sojourner” from the subtitle of what is still the definitive
biography of McKay, Wayne F. Cooper’s Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the
Harlem Renaissance (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press,
1987).
2. For the historical prevalence of black international writing, see Wendy W. Walters,
At Home in Diaspora: Black International Writing (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2005). But Walters focuses on Chester Himes, Michelle Cliff,
Caryl Phillips, Simon Njami, and Richard Wright while hardly focusing on
Claude McKay.
3. Although a literary critic would usually talk about the narrative of A Long Way
from Home in the present tense of literary criticism, I talk about it instead in the
past tense. Here and there I use historical markers in order to synchronize the narrative
chronology with the biographical and historical chronologies for the benefit
of readers, even though in certain places there are discrepancies between
McKay’s autobiographical rendition of his life and biographical and historical
facts.
4. Scholars who have focused on this issue include Anthony Dawahare, Nationalism,
Marxism, and African American Literature between the Wars: A New Pandora’s Box
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003); William J. Maxwell, New Negro,
Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1999); James E. Smethurst, The New Red Negro: The
Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930–1946 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999); and Alan M. Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the
Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2002).
5. McKay’s A Long Way from Home exists in the public domain. According to my
research in the Library of Congress’s Copyright Office (specifically, the office containing
archives of copyright renewal paperwork), the original claimant of the
copyright of A Long Way from Home in March 1937 was Lee Furman, Inc., Entry
#103903. In the twenty-eighth year after its publication (or in the year 1965), no
renewal was recorded, and thus the book is in the public domain.
6. According to Cooper, McKay was reading and writing political material in
Jamaican newspapers, and in the United States, while enrolled at Kansas State
College from fall 1912 through spring 1914, he began his personal involvement
with radical politics. See Cooper, Claude McKay, 18–49, 68.
7. Note that aside from a passing reference to a “beloved teacher at Tuskegee” late in
the A Long Way from Home (chapter 23), McKay does not discuss his enrollment