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

Bowler

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.

Citation

Bowler. (2023). Comfort Food and Respectability Politics in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem and Banjo: A Story Without a Plot. Modernism/modernity, 30(1), 111-127. https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2023.a902605

• 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