When Wright Bid McKay Break Bread: Tracing Black Transnational Genealogy

Abstract

The consensus among Richard Wright scholars now deems that the existing literary critical approach to the author’s work is overdue for reevaluation, and, above all, it’s time for an analytic outlook that is adept at charting the author’s trajectory through his expatriate years. I would add that reassessing Wright’s final decade and a half as self-imposed exile would benefit from a fresh reconsideration of his disposition with respect to other black émigré authors, and not necessarily obvious associations.¹ Wright’s relationship vis-à-vis Harlem Renaissance author Claude McKay is a case in point. Some black Atlantic scholarship has recorded the cosmopolitan parallels between Wright and McKay, notably Michel Fabre’s and Tyler Stovall’s seminal studies of the 1990s, but the correspondences between the two black authors could do with additional reflection, a pursuit that tacks across the swells of established practices. My interest is in articulating the genealogical relationship between McKay as recuperated transnational father and Wright as self-exiled, prodigal, transnative son. To be sure, matching up McKay and Wright qualifies as a counterintuitive undertaking, as the two interwar phase notables are characteristically coupled in radical counterpoint. Wright and McKay are critically paired off in opposition not merely as historical figures but also as historic figurations, as emblematic and therefore antithetic representatives of their respective moments.