Chapter 18 Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes was the most popular and versatile of the many writers connected with the Harlem Renaissance. Along with Zora Neale Hurston, he wanted to capture the dominant oral and improvisatory traditions of black culture in written form. Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri. In childhood, since his parents were separated, he lived mainly with his maternal grandmother on Lawrence, Kansas.
Within the spectrum of artistic possibilities open to writers of the Harlem Renaissance—drawing on African American rural folk forms on literary traditions and forms that entered the United States from Europe and Great Britain; or on the new cultural forms of blacks in American cities—Hughes chose to focus his work on modern, urban black life. He modeled his stanza forms on the improvisatory rhythms of jazz music and adapted the vocabulary of everyday black speech to poetry. He also acknowledged finding inspiration for his writing in the work of white American poets who preceded him. Like Walt Whitman he heard America singing, and he asserted his right to sing America back; he also learned from Carl Sandburg’s earlier attempts to work jazz into poetry. Hughes did not confuse his pride in African American culture with complacency toward the material deprivations of black life in the United States. He was keenly aware that the modernist vogue in the black among white American was potentially exploitative and voyeuristic; he confronted such racial tourists with the misery as well as the jazz of Chicago’s South Side. Early and late, Hughes’s poems demanded that African Americans be acknowledged as owners of the culture they gave to the United States and as fully enfranchised American citizens.
Critical Perspectives
1.New Historicism
Steven Hoelscher, in “A Lost Work by Langston Hughes”, reports on the rediscovery of a lost essay by African American author Langston Hughes. It mentions Hughes’s travel through the South in 1927, his experiences seeing the chain gangs and how they inspired his poem Road Workers, and includes the essay he wrote on that experience as an introduction to the novel Georgia Nigger by John L. Spivak.[1]
Isabel Soto, in “I Knew that Spain Once Belonged to the Moors: Langston Hughes, Race, and the Spanish Civil War”, responds to Dolan Hubbard’s proposal to enhance scholarship on “Hughes and the international stage”, addresses race within the context of Hughes’s numerous writings inspired by the Spanish Civil War, which he covered as a war correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American. Through close readings of a number of texts, Isabel argues that the category of race provides a productive and neglected entry into reading the conflict in which the violent supremacist ideology of Spain’s colonial Army of Africa, chief instigators of the 1936 uprising, was contested by the opposing ideology of the African American combatants of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade volunteers. Inscribing race at the heart of the Spanish conflict enables us also to recover a key player in the forced transatlantic dispersal and enslavement of African men and women in the early modern period and to enrich Gilroy’s hugely influential paradigm by unearthing Spanish participation as well as recognizing Hughes as a vital black Atlanticist.[2]
W. S. Tkweme, in “Blues in Stereo: The Texts of Langston Hughes in Jazz Music”, examines the intersection between the literary works of the mid-20th century African American writer Langston Hughes and contemporary Jazz and Blues music of his era. Introductory comments are given noting how Hughes recognized and commented on African American music in his literature. Questions are then raised evaluating the extent to which Hughes’s literature has been received and incorporated into the works of Jazz musicians.[3]
Jonathan Scott, in “Advanced, Repressed, and Popular: Langston Hughes during the Cold War”, brings to light an important area of Langston Hughes’s work as a writer and an intellectual that has been neglected by critics and scholars. In the discipline of American studies, Hughes is known primarily as a “folk poet”, yet in his life he produced an enormous body of work that cannot be contained by this limited categorization, in particular the writing he published during the height of the cold war. The general conception of Hughes is that he went into political hiding after 1953, following his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and, for the rest of his career, steered clear of socialist projects such as the politicization of literature. But a reflection on his writing of the 1950s compels a different conclusion. Specifically, The First Book of Rhythms, published in 1954, based on a writing workshop for young people Hughes conducted in Chicago, is the focus of this paper. It embodies the main themes and strategies that unified Hughes’s prolific literary output during the cold war.[4]
Sonnet Retman, in “Langston Hughes’s Rejuvenation Through Joy: Passing, Racial Performance, and the Marketplace”, presents on the short story Rejuvenation Through Joy which is part of the book The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes. The short story’s use of satire to depict the use of race in U.S. capitalistic culture, including in regard to racial passing and the performance of race, is discussed.[5]
Glenn Jordan, in “Re-Membering the African-American Past”, argues that the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was part of the New Negro Movement that swept the USA in the early twentieth century. Through fiction, poetry, essays, music, theatre, sculpture, painting and illustration, participants in this first Black arts movement produced work that was both grounded in modernity and an engagement with African-American history, folk culture and memory. This paper focuses on two Harlem Renaissance artists, the poet and fiction writer Langston Hughes and the illustrator and mural painter Aaron Douglas, who were particularly concerned with matters of history, memory and meaning. Themes such as the African past, slavery, freedom, lynching and migration figure powerfully in their art; and they employed modes of artistic expression that were accessible to a broad audience of African Americans. Glenn explores such works as Hughes’s The Negro Speaks of Rivers, The Negro Mother, Afro-American Fragment and Aunt Sue’s Stories and Douglas’s four-part mural Aspects of Negro Life.[6]
Don James McLaughlin, in “Langston Hughes’s Ethics of Compromise: a Review of Which Sin to Bear?”, argues that David Chinitz’s Which Sin to Bear?: Authenticity and Compromise in Langston Hughes explores the poet’s interest in the concept of racial authenticity, as well as his growing appreciation of “compromise”. The book’s greatest contribution is the first published analysis of Hughes’s executive-session testimony before Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Released in 2003, the testimony offers new insight into the rhetoric Hughes adopted while under interrogation. While Hughes’s equivocations on the communist sentiments expressed in his poetry may strike some as a surrender to McCarthy’s scare politics, Chinitz argues that the transcript reveals instead a sequence of deliberately crafted, literary-theoretical rejoinders. This reading serves Chinitz’s argument that, across his career, Hughes became increasingly committed to theorizing an “ethics of compromise”.[7]
Etsuko Taketani, in “Spies and Spiders: Langston Hughes and Transpacific Intelligence Dragnets”, presents the navigation of poet Langston Hughes and his knowledge about the intelligence dragnets. Topics discussed include the memoir of Hughes relating to his experience of being harassed by Japanese police in his book I Wonder as I Wander, the expulsion of Hughes from Japan after being suspected as a Soviet spy, and being interrogated by former U.S. politician Joseph McCarthy and chief counsel Roy Cohn.[8]
2.Cultural Study
John Patrick Leary, in “Havana Reads the Harlem Renaissance: Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén, and the Dialectics of Transnational American Literature”, discusses the aspects of transnationalism in American literature and discusses the misinterpretations in translated cultural literature. He focuses on a letter written by Cuban journalist Gustavo Urrutia to American poet Langston Hughes in 1930, regarding a poetry collection Motivos de son, (Son Motifs) by Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén. He criticizes Urrutia’s interpretation in the letter that The Weary Blues by Hughes and Son Motifs are similar.[9]
3.New Criticism
Paul Williams, in “Physics made Simple: the Image of Nuclear Weapons in the Writing of Langston Hughes”, draws upon the Simple stories written by Langston Hughes in the post-war period and argues that Hughes repeatedly drew upon nuclear technology as part of a symbolic vocabulary that articulated American racial injustice, both within and outside the United States. For the character Simple, nuclear weapons are white weapons, deployed in defence of white interests, and whose use has been informed by hierarchies of racial difference. However, this technology also provides potent evidence that Hughes juxtaposes against claims of white racial superiority: how can white America continue to assert its racial maturity, while building weapons capable of extinguishing human life from the planet? Ultimately, the character of Simple asserts that non-military nuclear technology can help construct a future beyond race.[10]
4.Queer Study(https://www.daowen.com)
Shane Vogel, in “Closing Time: Langston Hughes and the Queer Poetics of Harlem Nightlife”, reflects the opinion on the sexuality of Langston Hughes. It mentions about rumors that Hughes was a gay, fueled by Hughes’s knowledge of sexual underworlds and his literary explorations of overt homosexuality, such as his short story Blessed Assurance. Shane also talks about the two events that propelled the speculation about Hughes’s sexuality: Arnold Rampersad’s biography of Hughes and Isaac Julien’s film, “Looking for Langston”.[11]
5.Cultural Study
Bartholomew Brinkman, in “Movies, Modernity, and All that Jazz: Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred”, presents literary criticism for the poem sequence Montage of a Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes. Primary focus is given to depictions of jazz music, particularly bebop, as an essentially African American musical form within the sequence as well as Hughes’s thoughts on movies. The anti-capitalist nature of the work is explained based on Hughes’s critique of exclusionary U.S. mass culture.[12]
【注释】
[1]Hoelscher S. “A Lost Work by Langston Hughes”. Smithsonian, 2019, 50(4):20-24.
[2]Soto I. “I Knew that Spain Once Belonged to the Moors: Langston Hughes, Race, and the Spanish Civil War”. Research in African Literatures, 2014, 45(3):130-146.
[3]Tkweme W S. “Blues in Stereo: The Texts of Langston Hughes in Jazz Music”. African American Review, 2008, 42(3/4):503-512.
[4]Scott J. “Advanced, Repressed, and Popular: Langston Hughes during the Cold War”. College Literature. 2006, 33(2):30-51.
[5]Retman S. “Langston Hughes’s Rejuvenation Through Joy: Passing, Racial Performance, and the Marketplace”. African American Review, 2012, 45(4):593-602.
[6]Jordan G.“ Re-Membering the African-American Past”. Cultural Studies, 2011, 25(6):848-891.
[7]McLaughlin D J. “Langston Hughes’s Ethics of Compromise: a Review of Which Sin to Bear?”. Journal of Modern Literature, 2015, 38(3):181-184
[8]Taketani E. “Spies and Spiders: Langston Hughes and Transpacific Intelligence Dragnets”. The Japanese Journal of American Studies, 2014(25):25-48.
[9]Leary J P. “Havana Reads the Harlem Renaissance: Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén, and the Dialectics of Transnational American Literature”. Comparative Literature Studies, 2010, 47(2):133-158.
[10]Williams P. “Physics made Simple: the Image of Nuclear Weapons in the Writing of Langston Hughes”.Journal of Transatlantic Studies (Springer Nature), 2008, 6(2):131-141.
[11]Vogel S. “Closing Time: Langston Hughes and the Queer Poetics of Harlem Nightlife”. Criticism, 2006, 48(3):397-425.
[12]Brinkman B. “Movies, Modernity, and All that Jazz: Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred”. African American Review, 2011, 44(1/2):85-96.