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A Forgotten Novel Reveals a Forgotten Harlem

Wilson, Jennifer
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/03/a-forgotten-novel-reveals-a-forgotten-harlem/518364/

Publisher:  The Atlantic
Date Written:  09/03/2017
Year Published:  2017  
Resource Type:  Article

Wilson brings attention to Claude McKay's novel "Amiable With Big Teeth" which was never published until 70 years after it was written and holds valuable information about an overlooked African American Harlem.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Written over 70 years ago but published just last month, the novel revolves around the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, in which Benito Mussolini's troops invaded, and went on to occupy, Ethiopia in the mid-1930s. Watching from across the Atlantic, many African Americans saw Italy's military campaign as a direct attack on black sovereignty by a white imperial power. But some communist sympathizers in the U.S., most of whom were white, tried to reframe the conflict as not being about race at all. They believed it was instead about the rising threat of global fascism and urged black Americans to align themselves with left-wing movements abroad and with the Soviet Union.

This debate about the value of communist internationalism over black nationalism is at the core of Amiable With Big Teeth. Written at a time when most scholars thought that black cultural production had come to a grinding halt as a result of the Great Depression (and the consequent dip in arts patronage), Amiable With Big Teeth provides unparalleled insight into this relatively understudied moment in black American history. But the novel, and the picture of Harlem political culture it offers, came dangerously close to being lost to history altogether. Written in 1941, it was only unearthed in 2009 when a graduate student named Jean-Christophe Cloutier came across the manuscript by accident while doing research at Columbia University. Now an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, Cloutier told me that he could assure readers "it was worth the wait."
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