Overview
The pioneering novel of transatlantic travel, political controversy, and sexual confession. A vital document of twentieth-century black literature and one of the earliest overtly gay fictions in the African American tradition. Published for the first time.
A Penguin Classic
Set mostly in the teeming Vieux Port of Marseilles, the narrative follows a range of characters uncommonly found in modern fiction: marginal figures who embody the most radical fringes of the Black Diaspora. While stowing away on a transatlantic ship, the homesick African Lafala is locked in a frigid closet, resulting in the loss of his frostbitten legs. He successfully sues the shipping company for negligence, and with the payoff travels to Marseilles to resume an affair with an Arabic-speaking North African prostitute, Aslima. Like many other characters in the novel, Aslima's conduct and perspective challenge even the relaxed sexual morality of the contemporary Jazz Age. McKay's cast list includes a French labor organizer and a gay American longshoreman who unite to protect black dock workers facing police harassment. With its scenes of non-white bodies seeking pleasure even as they are shipped, stolen, and sold for parts, McKay's novel explores the crisis of modern black identity amid American racism, French chauvinism, and an unforgiving global economy. This edition of Romance in Marseilles includes an introduction by McKay scholars Gary Holcomb and William Maxwell that aims to expand both the scope of black literary realism and the political significance of sexual freedom among "New Negro" artists and workers.
A Penguin Classic
Set mostly in the teeming Vieux Port of Marseilles, the narrative follows a range of characters uncommonly found in modern fiction: marginal figures who embody the most radical fringes of the Black Diaspora. While stowing away on a transatlantic ship, the homesick African Lafala is locked in a frigid closet, resulting in the loss of his frostbitten legs. He successfully sues the shipping company for negligence, and with the payoff travels to Marseilles to resume an affair with an Arabic-speaking North African prostitute, Aslima. Like many other characters in the novel, Aslima's conduct and perspective challenge even the relaxed sexual morality of the contemporary Jazz Age. McKay's cast list includes a French labor organizer and a gay American longshoreman who unite to protect black dock workers facing police harassment. With its scenes of non-white bodies seeking pleasure even as they are shipped, stolen, and sold for parts, McKay's novel explores the crisis of modern black identity amid American racism, French chauvinism, and an unforgiving global economy. This edition of Romance in Marseilles includes an introduction by McKay scholars Gary Holcomb and William Maxwell that aims to expand both the scope of black literary realism and the political significance of sexual freedom among "New Negro" artists and workers.
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