Postcolonial Hope and Agency as a Contestation of Ideological Utopias in Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6011389 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michael F Jiménez (0000-0002-8988-6930, Universidad de Valladolid, corresponding author), Mónica Fernández Jiménez (Universidad de Valladolid) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 479-494 |
| Publication date | 2022-11-18 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Utopian Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1045-991X • E-ISSN: 2154-9648 |
| Publisher | The Pennsylvania State University Press (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.5325/utopianstudies.33.3.0479 |
| OpenAlex | W4313563269 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
This article analyzes Claude McKay’s last novel, Amiable with Big Teeth—recently discovered in 2017—as a piece of postcolonial utopianist writing. The novel participates in an important debate on the role of utopias and utopian writing as ideological mechanisms that perpetuate colonial structures such as the nation-state. Through a critique of the Popular Front project in the black community of 1930s Harlem, Amiable with Big Teeth vindicates local knowledges and the assessment of the specific conditions of the present—ever-changing and transformable—in the development of strategies for resistance. As such, the spiritual role of Ethiopia for the community depicted, rather than constitute yet another national utopia, fulfills the same role as it did for the Jamaican Rastafarians: it is a mechanism for group self-assertion and the promotion of self-esteem that subaltern communities need in order to achieve full agency
Aesthetics · Art · Assertion · Ideology · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Subaltern · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Gender Studies · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law · Race, History, and American Society
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |