Claude McKay and the Display of Aristocracy
Claude McKay and the Display of Aristocracy
This chapter looks into Claude McKay's “Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem,” which was written during the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. McKay's novel hinges upon the question of what it means to be an “authentic” Ethiopian imperial representative. It focuses on one of the novel's characters, Alamaya, who admits cagily that a signed letter from the emperor establishing his bona fides “was authentic but not genuine”; later, as part of a scheme to raise funds for the Ethiopian cause, Alamaya and his secret communist colleague “invent” an Ethiopian princess by costuming a local Harlem woman. But in fact, it was Professor Koazhy, a costumed figure modeled after Marcus Garvey, and not the meek visiting Ethiopian prince Alamaya, who proves to be the “authentic” Ethiopian prince. The chapter also explains how the existence of a centralized Ethiopian empire would challenge the viability of an imagined extra-imperial network of black internationalism.
Keywords: Claude McKay, Second Italo-Abyssinian War, Ethiopian, imperial representative, Alamaya, Professor Koazhy, Marcus Garvey, black internationalism
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