This article considers Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille through two emerging fields of study: “Afropessimism” and anthropological theories of the “liminal hotspot.” It suggests that McKay’s novel functions as a… Click to show full abstract
This article considers Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille through two emerging fields of study: “Afropessimism” and anthropological theories of the “liminal hotspot.” It suggests that McKay’s novel functions as a critique of positive Harlem Renaissance images of diasporic movement by highlighting how racial “Blackness” functions as a system for rejecting people of color from the benefits of modernity and sovereign rights-bearing status in an expanded temporal and spatial frame. To explore this hypothesis, the article turns to new anthropological work on the liminal hotspot as a site of sustained, unresolved transition, reading the affectivity of diaspora as a negative one in McKay’s work that places an unsustainable pressure on ritual and performative stylizations and renders them untenable as forms for cultivating a sovereign condition.
               
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