The Transmission of Claude McKay’s Novels in the 20th and 21st Centuries

This article rotates between two moments in Claude McKay’s publication history: a U.K. edition of McKay’s second novel Banjo (2008) and the first American editions of his debut Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929). I use the choices that went into the respective cover designs as an aperture to examine how McKay’s work has been shaped and positioned by the publishing milieux of 1920s New York and early 2000s Britain. I analyse the construction of the categories of “Harlem Renaissance” and “world literature,” and the traffic between them, as revealed through McKay’s book history. Doing so will mean exploring, in the 1920s context, a triadic publisher-artist-author relationship; in the 2000s context, I will study the thought process, or lack thereof, through which an antiracist novel could be published with a cover design originally authored by the Italian Fascist artist Gino Boccasile.