Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962 (review)

Reviewed by: Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962 Veronica M. Gregg Michelle Ann Stephens. Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2005. 366 pp. $32.00. One of the major objectives of Black Empire is an exploration of “how certain black leaders and intellectuals of Caribbean descent chose to imagine African Americans as part of a global political community during the early years of the twentieth century” (1). These leaders and intellectuals, Michelle Ann Stephens argues, were concerned with “precisely how to represent some form of black nationality” Furthermore, she asserts, “they attempted to construct an oppositional form of black nationalism and political representation in an international imperial world that did not yet recognize black colonial subjects as national peoples” (3). Chapters 1 and 2 explore questions of masculinity and the relation of the woman of colour to the literature of a New Black World. The “masculine” under discussion includes Marcus Garvey in chapters 3 and 4, Claude McKay in chapters 5 and 6, and C.L.R. James in chapters 7 and 8. The conclusion briefly explores what the author defines as a black feminist imaginary, with a discussion of Audre Lorde and Michelle Cliff as offering alternative (feminine) interpretations of the black transnational Stephens begins her analysis of Marcus Garvey with a reading of the film version of Eugene O’Neill’s The Black Emperor and offers it as both bookends and conceptual lens through which Marcus Garvey’s own performance and pageantry can be interpreted. Responses to the Eugene O’Neill play and the (later) film, since the 1920s to the present, have been varied. Seen as burlesque and parody, in general terms, it has been condemned by many African American scholars and commentators [End Page 265] as an obsession, a fixation on the denigration of black humanity, and a preoccupation with the primitivism and untameable savagery that discourses of colonialism and white supremacy ascribe to people of African ancestry. The work also has been widely praised, mainly by white critics, as an Expressionist vehicle and as a study of aspects of the universal human condition. Charles Gilpin, the star of the 1920s play, knew critical triumph even as—it has been said—he was driven to despair and to drink by its racist elements, which he had sought unsuccessfully to change or inflect. Paul Robeson expressed regret at having accepted the film role. The Black Emperor was reprised early in 2006, both on the London stage and in the northeast of the United States; in the U.S., the lead role was played by a white woman actor, Kate Valk, in blackface. Eugene O’Neill’s work, then, as it engages and is engaged by questions of history, race, gender, and the human condition, remains deeply problematic and contested. The Black Emperor, notwithstanding, offers to Stephens the point of departure for a discussion of Garvey’s “spectacles” of black transnationality. Indeed, her own title, Black Empire, seems designed to deliberately, or provocatively, invoke O’Neill’s work. In analyzing the performances of the pan-Africanist leader, Stephens also includes perceptions by Garvey contemporaries, C.L.R. James and Cyril Briggs—the latter being one of Garvey’s West Indian nemeses. In terms of contemporary scholarship, she draws on the writing of well-known Garvey scholar, Robert Hill, as well as that of Paul Gilroy, who repeats the view that Garvey’s movement was a part of a tradition of “black fascism” and was in some metaphorical senses a precursor of what Hitler represented (93). Chapter 7 concludes with the suggestion that Garvey’s failed efforts shared similarities with those of the protagonist in O’Neill’s The Black Emperor, even though Marcus Garvey’s “comic opera” created linkages among Negroes worldwide. In chapter 3, Stephens analyzes the troubled Black Star Line project as part of the maritime context for Garvey’s own movements throughout the transatlantic, within a consideration of the sea as a gendered male space, beyond the plantation and urban cityscapes usually identified with black men. She rehearses some of the legal...

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