Claude McKay's “Banana Bottom”
A Fictional Return to Jamaica
Abstract
To consider Claude McKay exclusively as a Harlem Renaissance figure limits appreciation of the variety and complexity of this work. After his emigration to the United States in 1912, he never went back to his native Jamaica, but returned to it imaginatively in 1933 with Banana Bottom, a novel which stages the cultural clash at the center of his personal and poetic world. This essay focuses on matters of race and class that were McKay's concerns throughout his career as well as on gender issues dramatized by the choice of a female protagonist. Banana Bottom is especially representative of the Caribbean experience of hybridism, migration, displacement, colonization, and slavery, but also of the sometimes neglected multicultural layers of American literature. By highlighting McKay's roots and background, this novel serves as a useful counterpoint to his participation in the Harlem Renaissance, "a long way from home".
Copyright (c) 2001 The Author(s)
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