The African American novel tradition has long influenced other black writers’ shaping of racial and cultural experience. More as a contemplation and suggestion for further inquiry into this relationship, I would like to close this study by considering the impact of African American culture and history on novels written by black authors who are not African American. Many writers could be included here – Michelle Cliff, Edwidge Danticat, Frank Hercules, Jamaica Kincaid, Paule Marshall, Elizabeth Nunez, and Zadie Smith – but I would like to consider three novels where African American cultural history influenced core motifs: Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928), Maryse Conde's I, Tituba Black Witch of Salem (1992), and Caryl Phillips, Crossing the River (1992). All use African American experience and the idea of a collective past to interrogate and expand received narratives of black identity.

Claude McKay is an early example of a writer whose interaction with African American novelists greatly shaped the diasporic vision of his novels. In the 1920s and 1930s when McKay composed his works, black writer was synonymous with black American writer, and black experience portrayed in widely published novels predominantly meant black American experience. Writers of the Francophone and Hispanophone Caribbean – Aimé Césaire of Martinique, Jacques Roumain of Haiti, Léon Damas of French Guiana, Luis Palés Matos of Puerto Rico, Nicolás Guillén of Cuba – chose poetry as their primary medium and Anglophone novel writing had yet to hit its stride in the 1940s and later with Victor Stafford Reid's New Day (1949), George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin (1953), and V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas (1961). McKay occupies a dual space during the 1920s–1930s, perceived as a West Indian writer at times and as a “Negro” writer at other times.

Born of farm parents, McKay was proud of his Jamaican antecedents, and used them to underscore the global interconnections of black culture. His work as a constable in Kingston brought him into intimate contact with both colonial racism as well as the intraracial color hierarchies that were its legacy. Festus Claudius McKay was a citizen of the world living in, among other places, Holland, England, Belgium, the Soviet Union, but it was in Harlem that McKay centered himself as novelist.