Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften Claude McKay's Liberating Narrative: Russian and Anglophone Caribbean Literary Connections: 28 (Caribbean Studies)

Claude McKay's Liberating Narrative: Russian and Anglophone Caribbean Literary Connections examines McKay's search for an original form of literary expression that started in Jamaica and continued in his subsequent travels abroad. Newly found research pertaining to his presence in several Russian periodicals, magazines, and literary diaries brings new light to the writer's contribution to the Soviet understanding of African American and Caribbean issues and his possible influence on Yevgeny Zamyatin, the writer he met during his 1922 - 1923 visit to Russia. The primary focus of this book is Claude McKay and his positive reception of Alexander Pushkin, Feodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy, the nineteenth-century Russian writers who influenced his literary career and enabled him to find a solution to his dilemma of a dual Caribbean identity. The secondary focus of this book is the analysis of McKay's affinity with his Russian literary predecessors and with C.L.R. James and Ralph de Boissière, his Trinidadian contemporaries, who also acknowledged the importance of Russian writers in their artistic development. The book discusses McKay as a precursor of Russian and Anglophone Caribbean links and presents a comparative analysis of cross-racial, cross-national, and cross-cultural alliances between these two distinct yet similar types of literature. Claude McKay's Liberating Narrative is highly recommended for undergraduate and graduate courses in Caribbean and comparative literature at North American, European, Caribbean, and African universities. Review «From the Harlem Renaissance to the Trinidadian Awakening, Anglophone Afro-Caribbean writers have actively expressed a culturally particular identity by engaging in a surrogate dialogue with Russian writing. With a focus on Claude McKay's struggle to define a folk-based West Indian cosmopolitan nationalism, Tatiana A. Tagirova-Daley's book maps, for the first time, the journey through classic Russian realism and Soviet internationalism toward a Caribbean postcolonial literature that both aroused ethnic identity and raised class consciousness.» (Dale E. Peterson, Amherst College) «This spectacular new inquiry into Claude McKay's presence in Russian periodicals and literary diaries illuminates in entirely novel ways the Harlem Renaissance writer's role in shaping Soviet insights into black matters. McKay's fascination with the black Russian writer Alexander Pushkin and the white Russian radical Leo Tolstoy, alongside his acquaintanceship with revolutionary Caribbeans C.L.R. James and Ralph de Boissière, makes this remarkable study requisite reading for future interracial, transnational, and transcultural study.» (Gary Edward Holcomb, Ohio University; Author of 'Claude McKay', 'Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance' and 'Hemingway and the Black Renaissance') About the Author Tatiana A. Tagirova-Daley obtained her PhD in Caribbean literature and linguistics at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus and teaches literature and writing at Elizabeth City State University. Among some of her scholarly publications are those on Claude McKay, Frantz Fanon, Derek Walcott, Jacques Roumain, Ralph de Boissière, and Patrick Chamoiseau. She is the co-editor of Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Literature and Culture (2010).