Jim Crow Meets Modernism in Red Russia

Abstract Claude McKay’s 1922 journey to Bolshevik Russia was decisive for his own artistic development and also furthered the Communist Party’s grasp of the importance of “the negro question” for global class struggle. Yet one aspect of his trip remains strangely neglected by literary scholars: Already celebrated for his verse, McKay took up prose fiction in earnest for the first time inside the early Soviet state. This formal pivot not only helped transform the poet into one of the key novelists of the Harlem Renaissance less than a decade later but also facilitated McKay’s synthesis of the Black Radical and international socialist traditions into what would eventually become his own idiosyncratic literary Black Marxism.