CANCELED | Book Launch & Reading | Romance in Marseille, March 27

Dr. Gary Holcomb

The African American Studies Department hosts a book launch and reading of Romance in Marseille, a Claude McKay novel unearthed by Dr. Gary Holcomb, at the Athena Cinema on March 27 from 2 to 4 p.m.

Co-editors Holcomb of Ohio University and Dr. William J. Maxwell of Washington University in St. Louis will read from the text and hold a Q&A from 2 to 3 p.m. upstairs at the Athena Cinema.

A reception follows across the street in the African American Studies Department, 31 S. Court St., Athens.

• See Holcomb Unearths Unpublished Harlem Renaissance Novel by Claude McKay.

Review Comments

[The editors’] critical apparatus sets the novel in its own time and establishes its importance . . .  as “a pioneering novel of physical disability . . . and one of the earliest queer fictions in the African American tradition.”—Michael Dirda, Washington Post

Its [Romance in Marseille’s] debut coincides with recent shifts in thinking about the Renaissance, which is increasingly seen as grappling not only with race but with class, gender, sexuality and nationality. —Talya Zax, New York Times

If you skipped the introduction and surrendered access to Google, you could easily mistake it for a novel written last year. It’s about bodies, disability, sex, Islam, slavery, and capital. There are lesbians. There is gender-bending. There is socialism. —Molly Young, New York Magazine