Join us for a special screening and conversation, celebrating acclaimed Jamaican poet, novelist, and Harlem Renaissance pioneer Claude McKay, at Georgia State University.
Production Cinétévé France, 52 minutes, 2025
This screening will be in French with English subtitles.
SYNOPSIS:
A rebellious voice of the Harlem Renaissance, Jamaican poet Claude McKay spent two decades traveling the world, immersing himself in artistic and political avant-gardes while building an enduring body of work.
From Jamaica to Morocco, via USA, England, Russia and France, this film is a captivating voyage through the 1920s in the footsteps of this great vagabond writer.
This remarkable documentary portrait, illustrated with rare archival footage and photographs, told by his own words narrated by Gaël Faye, and set to a stirring soundtrack, brings his legacy to life. His famous century-old anti-lynching poem If We Must Die resonates with today's Black Lives Matter movement, revealing continuities of struggles and resistance he inspired.
WATCH THE TEASER:
ABOUT CLAUDE McKAY
@ Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
His poem “If We Must Die” made McKay an iconic figure of the Harlem Renaissance, the African American cultural movement of the 1920s. A writer and lifelong traveler, he left a segregated United States to journey across Europe at the dawn of the 20th century, capturing the atmosphere of the cities he lived in and the social movements he encountered.
In 1923, McKay arrives in Paris; from 1924 to 1928, he lived in Marseille, which became the inspiration for his novels Banjo and Romance in Marseille. From Toulon to Strasbourg, via Douarnenez, he moved easily between working-class circles and literary communities.
His literature from the margins, driven by a raw and uncompromising style, gives voice to dockworkers and the dispossessed. In particular, it depicts the cosmopolitan, working-class life of Marseille. The freedom with which McKay moved through his time, living first as a journalist and then as a writer, is remarkable.
Without taboo, he addressed all forms of sexuality. And when he took on the question of race, he did so more from a social perspective than a purely communal one. A forerunner of the writers of négritude, his originality and universal outlook make him a strikingly relevant figure today.
McKay, one of the architects of an emerging transatlantic Black consciousness paved the way for Aimé Césaire, James Baldwin, and the Black Lives Matter movement.
After the film, we invite the audience to stay and engage in a Q&A conversation with the director Matthieu Verdeil and GSU academic voices:
PANELISTS
Edvige Jean-François, DHumLitt Executive Director GSU Center for Studies on Africa and Its Diaspora
Matthieu Verdeil
Film Director of ”Claude McKay, wanderings of a rebellious poet”
Dr. Rashana Lydner
Assistant Professor GSU Africana Studies Dept
Dr. Harcourt Fuller
Associate Professor GSU History Dept
Curt Jackson
Ph.D. Candidate /Mellon IAS Fellow GSU History Dept
If you cannot attend this event, there will be an additional screening of this film on March 16th at 7PM here
This event is hosted by Georgia State University, the Center for Studies on Africa and its Diaspora (CSAD), the Africana Studies Department, and CSAD IAS, in collaboration with Villa Albertine.
