In the past 2 or 3 decades, modernist scholarship has largely moved beyond and certainly challenged the mythologised trope of the alienated, exiled modernist writer. Such figures were generally exiled by choice and ‘homeless’ only metaphorically, but their experiences have long been lauded as the ideal conditions for modernist formal innovations. This essay explores the ways in which issues of homelessness and precarity have been considered thus far in modernist scholarship, arguing that more work is needed to account for the particular experiences of writers I here call the ‘homeless modernists’ and the impact of unstable housing upon modernist aesthetics and themes.
This article argues that Romance in Marseille marks a significant shift in Claude McKay’s approach to primitivism, one that necessitates a reconsideration of his reputation—based on his two novels of the late 1920s—as perhaps the Harlem Renaissance’s foremost proponent of “strategic primitivism.” Tracing the development of McKay’s primitivism from Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929) to his most recently published novel, this essay suggests an evolution along philosophical, political, and stylistic lines. Romance in Marseille deconstructs the primitive/civilized binary, forgoing the antiracist potentialities of primitivism for the utopian possibilities of international Marxism, interracial collaboration and queer love.
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