ABSTRACT
Drawing on Kiese Laymon’s contemporary theorizations of “abundance” and “meagerness,” this chapter offers a new reading of Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1927) that places McKay in conversation with both psychoanalytic and sexological thought. The novel demonstrates the contrast between the meagerness of such expertise, with its understanding of queerness as tragic lack, and the abundance of Black vernacular knowledge of bodies, genders, sexualities, and social bonds—both in and beyond the world of the novel. Home to Harlem reflects a landscape of gender, sex, and sexuality that displaces the entrenched taxonomy of identities. In this way, the chapter argues, McKay’s work provokes a revised understanding of modernist sexuality writ large.
