O’Hanlon, Karl
(2024)
Ferdinand Levy: A Harlem Renaissance Dubliner and De-Colonial Cosmopolitanism.
Journal of Modern Literature, 47 (3).
pp. 124-144.
ISSN 1529-1464
Abstract
Flashes from the Dark was the 1941 debut by Jamaican poet Ferdinand Levy, published in Dublin while he was a medical student. It brought something of the Harlem
Renaissance to Lower Baggot Street. Despite favorable reviews by Irish poets such as
Austin Clarke and others, Levy has vanished from literary posterity. His many passions—literary, political, musical—situate him at a properly intersectional literary history of mid-century Dublin, and he critiques the particular structure of systemic racism
in 1930s and ’40s Ireland. Levy’s “decolonial cosmopolitanism” mounts a challenge to
nationalist tendencies within the mainstay of Irish postcolonial thinking, a factor in his
occlusion. His awkward poetics—wavering between a belated signature of the Harlem
Renaissance and parodies of English sonnets and ballads—constitutes “mimicry” in
Homi Bhabha’s sense—destabilizing white discourse with “flashes from the dark.”
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