American Dreams and Nightmares: Migration and Myth in Claude McKay’s Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Abstract

Literary critics have narrated Claude McKay’s early-twentieth-century Jamaican American migration in terms of a popular conceptualization of the American dream. This essay analyzes the ways in which McKay wrote in terms of and against the popular rhetorical tropes of the American dream and the American nightmare, especially in poetry submitted to and published by American editors, magazines, journals, and presses. In effect, this essay exposes the degree to which McKay represented the realization of the American dream as a myth and the pursuit of the American dream as a nightmare, especially for black Caribbean migrants and African American citizens.