Anne Donlon delves into the history of the British Left after World War I to assert the significance of the Black and feminist interventions of Claude McKay and Sylvia Pankhurst. Donlon centers the publication of “A Black Man Replies,” McKay’s letter to the editor published in Pankhurst’s newspaper The Worker’s Dreadnought, against white supremacist logics mobilized by prominent 1920s leftists that contributed to the reestablishment of policing of and violence against black men. Donlon’s archival discoveries weave together biography, material cultural analysis, and histories of trans-Atlantic activism, and, in the process, reveal the labor of building radical intersectional solidarity that came before and followed the moment of “A Black Man Replies.”
Articles by Anne Donlon
Anne Donlon is a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University's Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives & Rare Book Library and the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. Her edition of previously unpublished correspondence and poems, Langston Hughes, Nancy Cunard, and Louise Thompson: Poetry, Politics, and Friendship in the Spanish Civil War (2012), was published in the Lost & Found CUNY Poetics Documents series. She received her PhD in English from the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her dissertation laid the groundwork for her current book project, Dear Folks at Home: African American Women Organizers, Writing, and the Spanish Civil War, as well as this article for Lateral. Her work has also appeared in the Massachusetts Review and Modernism/modernity.