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“In recent years, we have taken a much more expansive look at the Harlem Renaissance,” said Venetria K. Patton of Purdue University, who co-edited the 2001 anthology “Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology.” “The race narrative is still an important aspect of the Renaissance. But there were questions of sexuality, of gender, of how to position oneself in an environment that didn’t see you as equal,” that have historically received less attention.
Why? During the Renaissance, mainstream narratives of the movement were shaped by its complicated relationship with white readers. The Renaissance was made economically possible partially through the patronage of wealthy white individuals like Charlotte Osgood Mason, and could therefore be constrained by their interests and their prejudices. Led by figures like Du Bois, many of the Renaissance’s participants saw the movement as a way to address white audiences, and encourage them “to re-evaluate black lives as being equal,” according to Jean-Christophe Cloutier, co-editor of “Amiable With Big Teeth.” Efforts to redirect the movement to black audiences, and to write about a wider array of concerns, were largely relegated to the Renaissance’s queer subculture.
McKay belonged both to that subculture and to the movement’s mainstream. His 1928 novel “Home to Harlem” was the first American best seller by a black writer. But despite being seen as one of the Renaissance’s guiding lights, McKay — Jamaican, bisexual, a Marxist who grew disenchanted with communism before the rest of his cohort — also brought an outsider’s critical gaze to the movement. He was concerned not only with whom their target audience should be but also with how they depicted class politics, particularly in a queer context. Maxwell, one of the editors of “Romance in Marseille,” notes that the novel’s most overt gay characters include a black female prostitute and “a dock worker socialist white male stud.” That was a remarkable departure from conventions of the Renaissance, in which most queer relationships were depicted in “a genteel context of gay male instruction,” as Maxwell put it. Holcomb, the book’s other editor, pointed out that “Romance in Marseille” depicts great freedom in working-class queer life. “The queer characters are not portrayed as being exotic or subcultural,” he said. “They’re just ordinary working people.”
McKay’s vision of a black cultural movement that transcended national, class and sexual barriers was not unique. Several of his contemporaries who similarly challenged the Renaissance’s norms have also experienced recent revivals. Two novels by Ann Petry (including “The Street,” her revolutionary novel of black, female working-class life) were reissued by the Library of America in 2019. Jeffrey C. Stewart’s 2018 biography “The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke” brought renewed attention to the other most significant gatekeeper of the Renaissance, looking specifically at the influence of his queerness. “There Is Confusion,” by Jessie Redmon Fauset, the longtime editor of the official N.A.A.C.P. magazine The Crisis, whose work was often disregarded because of her gender, is being reissued on Feb. 11, the same day “Romance in Marseille” will be released. And two previously unpublished books by Zora Neale Hurston have come out in the last two years.
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