Claude McKay’s vagabond classicisms

Empire, uplift, and antiquity

Bibliographic Data

ID12936586
AuthorsBen Gregson (0009-0001-6101-7397, Harvard University, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume15
Issue4
Pages355-375
Publication date2023-08-07
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueClassical Receptions Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1759-5134 • E-ISSN: 1759-5142
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/crj/clad016
OpenAlexW4385636831
LanguageEN
References cited25

This article examines the classicisms of the influential Jamaican writer, Claude McKay. Taking as paradigmatic an allusion to the myth of Laocoön in Banjo, it analyses McKay’s troubling of the classical notion of translatio imperii et studii throughout his work. Consistently rejecting imperium, McKay nevertheless embraced classical studium as a potential source of racial uplift and new creative expression. He resists both hegemonic Euro-American classicisms which appropriated Greco-Roman antiquity to authorize their imperial projects and simplistic Afrocentric classicisms which relocated imperial fantasies in Egypt and Ethiopia. However, McKay still admired the cultural legacies of Greco-Roman and African ancient civilizations. Freely and selectively enlisting these various, often-contradictory, classical traditions, McKay’s vagabond classicisms attacked empire, in all its forms, while reaffirming the aesthetic and social potential of decolonized and heterogeneous antiquities

Allusion · Ancient history · Art · Empire · Hegemony · Late Antiquity · Literature · Mythology · Politics · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Classics · History · Law

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