Comfort Food and Respectability Politics in Claude McKay's Home to Harlem and Banjo: A Story Without a Plot.

This article examines the portrayal of food and eating in Claude McKay's novels *Home to Harlem* (1928) and *Banjo: A Story Without a Plot* (1929), highlighting how McKay's characters engage with food in ways that challenge early twentieth-century racial stereotypes and discourses on health, restraint, and respectability. McKay's protagonists enjoy racially coded Southern foods alongside international cuisines, often eating and drinking to excess as an expression of pleasure and cultural identity rather than nutritional concern. The novels explore tensions between instinctual enjoyment and societal expectations of self-control, reflecting broader debates about Black respectability, racialized appetites, and modernity. Critical responses to McKay's work, including those by Alain Locke, Marcus Garvey, and W. E. B. Du Bois, reveal conflicting views on his depiction of Black life, particularly regarding excess and morality. Ultimately, McKay's narratives assert a radical affirmation of Black vitality and gustatory pleasure as forms of resistance to dominant cultural norms.