The Jook

1
The Jook

1. The Jook is the most important musical space in
   America, for in it blues and jazz were born
2. The sexuality of the Jook has infused itself
   into the sensuality of Negro music.
3. Negro theatre (as built up by Negroes) is based
   on Jook situations, even though some of the
   upper class Negro population is embarrassed of
   this fact and tries to efface it. In fact, it is
   the only form of Negro theatre.
4. White performers are continually trying to
   recreate the Jook and continually failing.
   Likewise, Negro music taken out of the Jook for
   white audiences does not constitue authentic
   Negro performance.
5. How does Hurstons description set Negro theater
   apart from other forms? What are the
   implications of the value, here, placed on
   audience?

2
Absence of the Concept of Privacy

1. The Negro is accustomed to communal life wherein
   privacy is not only a foreclosed possibility, but
   a potential danger.
2. Openness allows the community to deal with its
   discord (a more natural occurring phenomenon than
   accord).
3. Lovemaking and fightingsince they are topics
   suitable fot bragging in the Negro communityare
   like everything else that demands acclaim,
   high-art forms.
4. Does this point seem to fit on this essay? If
   not, why include it?

3
Dialect

• The issue of dialect is a contentious one, and
  the Negro community posses more than anybody
  else.
• Moreover, not all members of a dialect-community
  adhere to the rules of that given dialect, and it
  has become anathema to blanketly associate
  Negroes with dialect.
• Nevertheless, certain rules are
• operative, definable, and appear in black
  art.

4
Home to Harlem

• By
• Claude McKay

5
Claude McKay (1889-1948)

• Jamaican writer, policeman, poet, and journalist
  
• Songs of Jamaica (1912), McKays first poetry
  collection, contained the first poems published
  in Patois
• 3) Constab Ballads (1912), Mckays second
  collection was based on his experience as a
  police officer in Jamaica.
• In 1912, McKay leaves Jamaica for the U.S. and
  enrolls at Tuskegee Institute, studying
  agriculture.
• In 1914, McKay appalled by the brutality of U.S.
  racism---quits Tuskegee for Japan and marries
  Eulalie Lewars.
• In 1919, McKay befriends Max Eastmaneditor of
  the socialist journal The Liberatorand publishes
  If We Must Die therein. Soon thereafter, Mckay
  becomes co-editor of the journal until 1922
• During his time as an editor at the Liberator,
  McKay befriends a group of black radicals who
  were unhappy with both Marcus Garveys
  nationalism and the middle-class reformist NAACP.
• Along with Cyril Brigs, Richard More, and Wilfred
  Domingo, McKay founds a clandestine
  organization dedicated to socialist revolution
  called African Blood Brotherhood in London
  England, writing for several communist and
  socialist journals including Workers Dreadnought
  and Cambridge Magazine.
• His novels include Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo
  (1930), and Banana Bottom (1933)
• He also published two autobiographies and one
  collection of short stories.
• In Later life he renounces Communism and
  embraces Roman Catholicism

6
Red Summer 1919

• Red Summer, a term coined by author James Weldon
  Johnson, is used to describe the summer and
  autumn of 1919. Race riots erupted in several
  cities in both the North and South of U.S. The
  three most violent episodes happened in Chicago,
  Washington D.C., and Elaine, Arkansas. These were
  part of a series of 20 or more race riots
  occurring in the U.S where blacks were the
  victims of physical attacks, including

1919 - Charleston Race Riot, May 10, 1919 -
Longview Race Riot, early July, 1919 -
Washington, D.C. Race Riot, July 1919 - Chicago
Race Riot, July 27 - Aug. 2, 1919 - Knoxville
Race riot, Aug. 30, 1919 - Omaha Race Riot,
Sept. 28, (pictured) 1919 - Elaine Race Riot,
Oct. 1,
7
Claude McKay, If We Must Die (1919)

• If we must die, let it not be like
  hogsHunted and penned in an inglorious
  spot,While round us bark the mad and hungry
  dogs,Making their mock at our accursed lot.
• If we must die, O let us nobly die,So that
  our precious blood may not be shedIn vain then
  even the monsters we defyShall be constrained to
  honor us though dead!
• O kinsmen we must meet the common
  foe!Though far outnumbered let us show us
  brave,And for their thousand blows deal one
  deathblow!What though before us lies the open
  grave?
• Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly
  pack,Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting
  back!

8
McKay, Return to the Primitive
(1923)Primitivism, Futurism, Cubo-Futurism,
and CommunismPart I

• Our age is the age of Negro art. The slogan
  of the aesthetic world is Return to the
  Primitive. The Futurists and the Impressionists
  are agreed in turning everything upside down in
  an attempt to achieve the wisdom of the primitive
  Negro. Claude McKay

Miguel Covarrubias
Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti 1876-1944
Pablo Picasso 1881-1973
Picassos Femme nue....
Boccionis Unique Forms in Continuity and Space
Kazimir Malevich The Knife Grinder
9
McKay, Return to the Primitive
(1923)Primitivism, Futurism, Cubo-Futurism,
and CommunismPart II
Marinettis Poesia
Carlo Carrà, Funeral of the Anarchist Galli
(1910-1911)
Goncharovas The Cyclist
MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM 2) The essential elements
of our poetry will be courage, audacity and
revolt. 3) Literature has up to now magnified
pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want
to exalt movements of aggression, feverish
sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous
leap, the slap and the blow with the fist. 4) We
declare that the splendor of the world has been
enriched by a new beauty the beauty of speed. A
racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with
great tubes like serpents with explosive breath
... a roaring motor car which seems to run on.
6) The poet must spend himself with warmth,
glamour and prodigality to increase the
enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7) Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no
masterpiece that has not an aggressive character.
Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of
the unknown, to force them to bow before man. 9)
We want to glorify war - the only cure for the
world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive
gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas
which kill, and contempt for woman. We will
sing of the great crowds agitated by work,
pleasure and revolt the multi-colored and
polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern
capitals the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals
and the workshops beneath their violent electric
moons . steel horses with long tubes for
bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes
whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a
flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.
10
Claude McKays Russian Sojourn and Journalism

1. The Soviet Union invites McKay to go on a junket
   through the nation under the auspices of the New
   Economic Policy (NEP), launched in 1921 and
   ending, with the first Five-Year Plan of 1928.
2. The era of the NEP is distinguished as a era of
   broad-mindedness and relative tolerance, the NEP
   years reintroduced to Russia a contained
   capitalism, and during this period images of the
   United States abounded in film, journalism, and
   other routes of consumer culture.
3. Although the United States continued to be
   condemned as the paragon of evil capitalism,
   American methods of industrialization and
   technological advance were supported and admired

11
Communism, Humanism, and the Racial IdealMcKay,
Soviet Russia and the Negro (1923)

• To the Russians, I was merely another
  type, but stranger, with which they were not yet
  familiar....Their curiosity had none of the
  intolerable impertinence and often downright
  affront that any very dark colored man, be he
  Negro, Indian or Arab, would experience in
  Germany or England.

• The English people from the lowest to the
  highest, cannot think of a black man as being
  anything but an entertainer, a boxer, a Baptist
  preacher or a menial. The Germans are just a
  little worse. Any healthy looking black coon of
  an adventurous streak can have a wonderful time
  palming himself off as another Siki or a buck
  dancer. When an American writer introduced me as
  a poet to a very cultured German, a lover of all
  the arts, he could not believe it, and I dont
  think he does yet. An American student tells his
  middle-class landlady that he is having a black
  friend to lunch But are you sure that he is not
  a cannibal? she asks, without a flicker of a
  humorous smile! But in Petrograd and Moscow, I
  could not detect a trace of this ignorant
  snobbishness among the educated classes, and the
  attitude of the common workers, the soldiers and
  sailors was still more remarkable. It was so
  beautifully naive for them I was only a black
  member of the world of humanity.

12
Trotsky to McKay (1923)

• When the hand of capitalism or even sooner
  the hand of militarism tears them Negroes
  mechanically from their customary environment and
  forces them to stake their lives for the sake of
  new and complicated questions and conflicts, then
  their spiritual conservatism gives way abruptly
  and revolutionary ideas find rapid access to a
  consciousness thrown off its balance.

13
McKay Negroes In AmericaThe Question of Black
Nationalism and Internationalism

• For the Negro in America it is very useful to
  be imbued with race consciousness, but it is
  still more useful for him to look at the problem
  which disturbs him from a class point of view,
  and to join the class struggle as an
  internationalist.
• Although an international Socialist...I
  believe that, for subject peoples, at least,
  nationalism is the open door to Communism.

14
The U.S. Negro VanguardMcKays Insistence on a
Diaspora of Difference

• A Confidential Comintern Memo

• McKay, For a Negro Congress

• The Negro population of the world is
  estimated to be about 200 million but the
  articulate revolt against imperialist oppression
  comes from that SMALL MINORITY THAT IS MORE OR
  LESS in close contact with the white proletariat
  of America and Africa, and has somewhat
  assimilate the culture of the exploiting race.
  Thus, it is the Negro population of the U.S., the
  Caribbean islands and West and South Africa that
  is active in the modern movement against
  imperialist exploitation.

• The American Negro, by reason of his higher
  education and culture, his greater capacity for
  leadership and because of the urgency of the
  issues in America, will furnish the leadership to
  the Negro race.
•  

15
Home to Harlem (1928)Central Themes and Key
Concepts

1. The overlap, competition, and intersection of
   discourses on race and the race problem.
   McKays Primitivism (as an alternative humanism)
2. African-American intra-group hybridity
3. The Cage of Civilization
4. Harlem as both a locale of jubilant primitivism
   or a locus of moral, social, and economic
   exploitation of the proletariat.
5. Unity in Difference
6. The recuperation of the Revolutionary lumpen
7. Vagabondism
8. Black Internationalism vs. Black Nationalism

16
Going Back HomeEssentialism, Labor, Race- and
Racist RelativismCompeting Racial Discourses
Jake though how strange it was to hear an
Englishman say darky without being offended.
Back home he would have been spoiling for a
fight. There he would have hear nigger than
darky, for he knew that when a Yankee said
nigger he meant hatred for Negroes, whereas
when he said darky he meant friendly contempt.
He preferred white folks hatred to their friendly
contempt.

• It was strange to Jake that these Arabs washed
  themselves after eating and not before . Jake
  was used to the lowest and hardest sort of life,
  but even his leather-lined stomach could not
  endure the Arabs way of eating. Jake also began
  to despise the Arabs.
• One of the sailor flattered Jake. Youre the
  same like us chaps. You aint like them dirty
  jabbering coolies.
• But Jake smile and shook his head in a
  non-committal way. He knew that if he was just
  like the white sailors, he might have signed on
  as a deckhand and not a stoker.

• Talking Points
• unworkable integrations
• geographically based race relativism
• internalized racial essentialism
• race as a specialized form of class division

17
Going Back HomeRethinking Race, Place, and
Relativism in Exile
Jakes woman could do nothing to please him
now. She had tried to get down in his thoughts
and share them with him. But for Jake this woman
was now only a creature of another raceof
another world. He brooded day and night. It
was two years since he had left Harlem. Fifth
Avenue, Lenox Avenue, and one hundred and
Thirty-fifth Street, with their chocolate-brown
and walnut-brown girls, were calling him .
Harlem for mine cried Jake. I was thinkin I
was happy over heah. I wasnt mahself
Take me home to Harlem, Mister Ship!

• And when it was all over he was seized with the
  awful fever of lonesomeness. He felt all alone
  in the world. He wanted to run away from the
  kind-heartedness of his lady of the East End.
• Why did I ever enlist and come over
  here? He asked himself. Why did I want to mix
  mahself up in a white folks war? It aint ever
  was any of black folks affair . Always
  thinking theyve got something to do with white
  folks business.