Black Internationalism, Print Culture, and Political Education in Claude McKay’s Banjo

Abstract

Over three decades ago, Robert Hill, the celebrated archivist and historian of the Universal Negro Improvement Association movement, argued that “the history of the audience is what’s missing in the history of black radicalism.” Building on Hill’s provocation, this article theorizes modes of diasporic readership through the literature of the Jamaican communist and literary giant Claude McKay’s novel Banjo. Through a close reading of two scenes in which the novel’s characters engage in conversations about Black periodicals and embrace the contradictions within them, the article offers a provisional framework for exploring modes of readership and political education through print culture. Banjo must be read in part as an extension of McKay’s political journalism and within his broader efforts to bridge Black nationalist and communist movements throughout the interwar period. Drawing on speculative and literary approaches to archival research, the article argues that the renewed emphasis on heterogeneity, ephemeral encounters, and place making depicted within Banjo can open up new lines of inquiry toward redressing the methodological challenges and textual silences surrounding the question of the audience and the study of radical print cultures within traditional archives.