Modernism and the Queer Theory of Diaspora

In an essay included in Melanie Micir’s edited collection Contemporary Queer Modernism, I draw on on recent developments in queer of color, queer diasporic, and postcolonial queer studies to reflect on the queerness and modernism of early twentieth-century diasporic cultural formations. The chapter focuses on the fictions of Black Jamaican writer Claude McKay as a theorist of queer diasporic life and literary modernism in their intersections and discontinuities. In Home to Harlem, Banjo, and Romance in Marseille, McKay gives literary expression to the queer forms of working-class diasporic sociality generated by histories of transoceanic and transcontinental labor migration, which he renarrates as histories of gender and sexual experimentation. As I argue here, however, McKay’s novels also point to their own classed and gendered limits as an archive, their modernism a prompt to look elsewhere for the traces of women’s practices of queer relation. Originally published April 2025.