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Comfort Food and Respectability Politics in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem and Banjo: A Story Without a Plot

Bowler

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Abstract

This article examines two of Claude McKay’s novels, Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo: A Story Without a Plot (1929) with relation to their characters’ complex and sometimes seemingly contradictory attitude to food cultures. McKay’s characters demonstrate an awareness that their food choices are political, whether that be in terms of how much they eat—the stigma associated with a certain stereotype of the gluttonous black subject—or what they eat—any food coded black, indigenous, or from the global South carries negative associations—and they make their choices accordingly. The lead characters in each novel, however, claim a radical and subversive pleasure in eating in the face of the imperative from respectability politics to exercise restraint. In his portrayal of a happy and healthy licentious black consumer, then, McKay is reclaiming a politics of pleasure from the terrain of black abjection.

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Apr 1, 2021
Online Publication Date Jul 20, 2023
Publication Date 2023-01
Publicly Available Date May 30, 2023
Journal Modernism/Modernity
Print ISSN 1071-6068
Electronic ISSN 1071-6068
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 30
Issue 1
Pages 111-127
DOI https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2023.a902605
Publisher URL https://muse.jhu.edu/article/902605

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