Langston Hughes and Performing Transnational Presence: Scottsboro Limited and Harvest

Abstract

Theatre revealed shifts between movements black modernism of 1920s and 1930s. As Langston Hughes recalls his autobiography Big Sea (1940) the 1920's were years of Manhattan's black Renaissance.... [T]he musical revue, Shuffle Along ... gave a scintillating send-off to vogue Manhattan, which reached its peak just before crash of 1929, crash sent ... all rolling down hill toward Works Progress Administration. (1) Hughes wrote Scottsboro Limited (1931) just before visiting Soviet Union. Hughes co-authored Harvest with Ella Winter and Ann Hawkins shortly after returning to United States but left play unfinished 1934. Both scripts provoke politically while experimenting theatrical forms to aestheticize narratives of recent upheaval United States. Following Hughes's markers for what he calls that vogue, Scottsboro Limited and Harvest fall chronologically between Shuffle Along (1921) and plays of WPA's Federal Theatre Project (1935-39). These plays remain powerful indicators of a transitional cultural moment which Soviet drama was also vogue. Attending to these plays reasserts theatre as a ubiquitous and influential medium 1930s cultures of United States. Analysis of these plays participates debates on status of transnational modernism at large, while clarifying a crucial element of Hughes's exchange with Soviet culture missing from recent literary studies. Internationally renowned as a poet, Langston Hughes has received renewed critical attention recent years with valuable research on transnational characteristics of his life, poetry, autobiography, and short stories. (2) Theatre, however, has received relatively little attention this critical revival, despite its centrality to Hughes's broad cultural consumption and to his literary work (as is evident from assessments of his biographers and from his correspondence with Carl Van Vechten). This essay reads Hughes's plays Scottsboro Limited and Harvest as theatrical representations of prisoners and workers specific to US contexts mirror Soviet-dominated internationalist film, journalistic theatre, and pageants. Hughes's 1930s participation a transnational aesthetic community of theatrical innovation devoted to developing proletarian theatre remains under-researched. His plays from period embody collaboration and emotional commitment across national lines. Hughes's travel supported circulation and translation of his works journals such as Soviet International Literature (with publications multiple languages) and many Spanish-language journals such as Contemporaneos, Sur, Revista de La Habana, El Diario de la Marina, Cristol, and El Mono Azul. (3) I argue Hughes's work revises Soviet cinematic and theatrical conventions, and these aesthetic choices affirm internationalism. Hughes modifies Soviet forms an act of international exchange, echoing Soviet calls for revolution, while challenging Comintern's Black Belt Nation Thesis and its implications for his poetics. (4) Hughes ends article Moscow: In a Land Where There Is No Jim Crow for International Literature with an English translation of Russian poem KINSHIR (5) For Hughes, Julian Anisimov's poem claims kinship in art between The Russian and Negro through the blood of Pushkin with a vision of unity between cultural nationalities in International. (6) Hughes's work and travel enacted an internationalism dialogue with Anisimov's vision, but Hughes resisted Moscow's authority within ideology of Soviet Internationalism as worldwide communist revolution. Still, Hughes celebrates impression Moscow there are no color bars, and very nature of Soviet system can never admit any sort of discriminatory racial separation, or setting apart from general worker's life of Negroes or any other minority group. …