Racial Mountain Research Articles

“Let us look at the immediate background of this young poet”: Langston Hughes and the Sociological Critique of Taste

Abstract: Langston Hughes’s classic essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” is commonly read as a defense of Black racial pride. I argue that it simultaneously performs a subtle but radical sociological critique of the Kantian paradigm of disinterested taste. “The Negro Artist and Racial Mountain” should therefore be read as a proto-sociology of literature that highlights the blind spot in regard to race often found in Bourdieusian frameworks. Hughes’s work can also provide the sociology of literature today with alternative models for thinking about the entanglement of taste, class, and power, and for conceptualizing aesthetic autonomy.

At the Foot of the Racial Mountain: Pauline Hopkins's Literary Exodus in Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad

At the Foot of the Racial Mountain:Pauline Hopkins's Literary Exodus in Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad Rod Taylor George S. Schuyler denied that black art existed separate from white art in his 1926 essay "The Negro-Art Hokum." Working within the vibrant New Negro movement, he asserted that Because a few writers with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion that the black American is so "different" from his white neighbor has gained wide currency. (97) Schuyler controversially argued that since the social, political, and economic conditions of the United States were similar for both white and black Americans, it did not create the conditions for a distinctly African American literary and cultural aesthetic. Instead, he believed that African American art and culture were subsumed in the American mainstream. Decades prior, at almost twenty years old, Pauline Hopkins wrote Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad (1879). It is a drama that weaves popular minstrel tropes with subtle commentary against the legacy of slavery and the current social state of African Americans. It employs song, dance, stock characters, and African American minstrel stars such as the famed Sam Lucas to present a message that differed from most nineteenth-century minstrelsy to challenge the reductive forms of depiction that had come to sully the imaginations of theater-goers in the United States.1 Because of Hopkins's dramatic work, [End Page 423] Schuyler's assumptions fall flat: her use of rusticity and the legacy of slavery as the locus of her content gave credence to a separate culture with its own complex histories that shaped her career as a writer in the early twentieth century. Hopkins is best known for her literary endeavors that engaged with the progressive representations of African Americans in the postbellum moment. Her 1900 novel Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Live North and South receives the lion's share of critical attention, but she was also prodigious in her production of essays, short fiction, and serialized novels such as Hagar's Daughter, Winona, and Of One Blood that appeared in the Colored American Magazine between 1900 and 1904. In Peculiar Sam, however, Hopkins was able to develop progressive ideas that subsequently emerged in her later fictions of race. In "Reinventing Slavery, Family, and Nation in Peculiar Sam" (2019), Marvin McAllister refers to both W. E. B. Du Bois's and David Blight's historical visions from Black Reconstruction (1935) and Race and Reunion (2001), respectively, to express how Hopkins "advanc[ed] progressive African-American modernity as a model for a nation in the process of rebuilding" to liberate her enslaved characters (394). I slightly deviate from McAllister on what Hopkins is attempting to liberate. I suggest that in Peculiar Sam, Hopkins desires to free her content from the constraints of the plantation and, instead, lay a foundation for the literary and cultural style that came to be associated with the Harlem Renaissance. For instance, Hopkins wrote Contending Forces in 1900, entirely abandoning the southern landscape as a setting in favor of a racially progressive Boston. Hazel V. Carby asserts in The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins (1988) that Hopkins's writing in the Colored American Magazine would create "a black renaissance in Boston" (xxxi). For Hopkins, Boston is a setting where African Americans can safely advance politically, socially, and economically, removed from the watchful and oppressive eye of Jim Crow by showing that any place other than the South is acceptable. This literary work was also evident in Hopkins's later fiction. Still, the groundwork for Hopkins's black renaissance began on the stage before the ideologies of Du Bois and Washington had a chance to influence black intellectual thought. According to James V. Hatch in his introduction to The Roots of African American Drama (1991), Hopkins wrote Peculiar Sam "for her [End Page 424] family's troupe, the Hopkins' Colored Troubadours; she employed the current minstrel dialect as well as song and dance to engage her audience in the serious subject of emancipation" (31). An examination of Hopkins's musical...

George S. Schuyler's “Shafts and Darts”: The Messenger Years, 1923-1924

George S. Schuyler's “Shafts and Darts”: The <i>Messenger</i> Years, 1923-1924

On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay by Cheryl A. Wall

Reviewed by: On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay by Cheryl A. Wall Jesse McCarthy Cheryl A. Wall. On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2018. 288 pp. $29.95. This review was completed and submitted to the journal before I learned of Cheryl Wall's passing on April 4, 2020. Like so many in the field, I owe an enormous debt to her pioneering scholarship and institutional leadership. As we mourn the loss of her warmth, generosity, and guidance, we are also reminded that Dr. Wall's intellectual legacy will always be with us. Through her works she extended our vision and changed our words, indelibly enriching the historical and theoretical study of the tradition. —JM Toni Morrison once described the precious and vulnerable space in which we attempt to read and write as "a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war." That state of peace, she observed, is paradoxically one of solitude and communion, "the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one," as she put it with characteristic elegance. Cheryl A. Wall's On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay, reminds us that Morrison is not an outlier so much as a consummate example of a self-fashioning essayistic tradition deeply rooted in African American literary history. Yet systematic and dedicated scholarly treatments of the essay as a black literary practice have been surprisingly rare. Indeed, until now only two full monographs published a decade apart, Gerald Early's pioneering study, Speech and Power: The African-American Essay and Its Cultural Context (Ecco, 1993), and Cheryl Butler's The Art of the Black Essay: From Meditation to Transcendence (Routledge, 2003), have been devoted to the subject. Given this paucity, Wall's book remedies a terrible lack and also inevitably sets a new benchmark, one that will hopefully spur a wave of studies and renewed specialist interest while providing instructors with an essential and much-needed pedagogical resource. Historically speaking, the essay has tended to be democratic in its ambitions but typically aristocratic in its rhetorical assumptions as well as the material conditions that underwrite its appearance. Montaigne's celebrated Essais, his "attempts" at capturing an ordinary experience that could speak to the common life of others, drew on a humanistic culture that flourished among the European elite and eventually became a privileged instrument and vehicle of Enlightenment thought. In the United States, the essay received an original impress and a new mandate from Emerson, who spoke of the individual sovereignty of the American scholar at Harvard in 1837. But across the Charles in the section of Boston's Beacon Hill known then as "Nigger Hill," David Walker was also radically revising the form, although his 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World emphasized not the grandeur of encompassing all knowledge within the self, but the horrors of mass ignorance and the collective abjection of his fellow black Americans. Like Emerson and the other luminaries of New England, Walker was keen to use the unruly freedom and individuated [End Page 145] voice of the essay to impart new vigor to society, to establish new relations among mankind, to make the essay a revolutionary instrument of consciousness: they have fed different, if also overlapping, rhetorical and literary traditions in the U. S. ever since. Emerson justly remains a touchstone for all readers interested in the essay. But how often do we hear about Walker's contributions to the form? What happened, we might ask, when the American essay was invested with the voices of persons whose very humanity was deemed suspect at best, and all too often simply denied outright? From Walker's Appeal and W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, Langston Hughes's "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" and Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" in the hands of James Baldwin or Ralph Ellison, gathered in Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider or Alice Walker's In Search...

The “Simple” Way to Climb a Racial Mountain

ABSTRACT This essay examines Langston Hughes's vision and cultural politics via his fictional character Jesse B. Semple. Known as the Simple stories, Hughes's sketches were collected in five volumes published during his lifetime, including Simple Speaks His Mind (1950), Simple Takes a Wife (1953), Simple Stakes a Claim (1957), The Best of Simple (1961), and Simple's Uncle Sam (1965). A sixth volume, titled The Return of Simple, was published in 1994. The author examines the stories in relation to his 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” and argues that Simple's musings were largely representative of black working-class ethos in the twentieth century. At the same time, the author situates Hughes's stories in the broader context of African diasporic literary and cultural history.

Langston Hughes and the Timeless Questions of Life and Death

ABSTRACT This essay probes the resonance of Langston Hughes's writings from the vantage point of twenty-first century America. More specifically, the author points up Hughes's capacity to provide succor and comfort for contemporary readers who have suffered in the wake of death, including the death of Trayvon Martin and the racial overtones involved. Drawing from both personal and professional experience, the author demonstrates how Hughes's poetry can be interpreted in spiritual terms. At the same time, the author reexamines Hughes's racial politics, especially his criticism of a young black poet, whom many believe to be Countee Cullen, at the outset of his famous essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.”

Which Sin to Bear? Authenticity and Compromise in Langston Hughes by David Chinitz

Which Sin to Bear? Authenticity and Compromise in Langston Hughes by David Chinitz New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 269 pages These are heady days for Langston Hughes scholarship. In 1959, James Baldwin opened his review of Hughes's Selected Poems with the slam that Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed by his genuine gifts--and depressed that he has done so little with Ten years later and Lindsay Patterson, in the New York Times, referred to Hughes as the most critically abused poet in America. Both would be surprised by the cottage industry in Hughes scholarship that has emerged over the past fifteen years; a wealth of primary and secondary material has substantially changed the critical conversation about his range of interests and his importance to modern--and modernist--American literary history. most important contribution to this resurgence is the sixteen-volume edition of his collected works issued by the University of Missouri Press, which makes much of his output readily accessible for the first time--including in the critically neglected areas of his journalism and essay writing, his translations, his children's fiction, and his drama. Three new volumes of his correspondence have recently been published, providing his exchanges with his mother, with Carl Van Vechten, and with the South African anti-apartheid magazine Drum. Attention to Hughes's radical verse and plays from the 1930s, material which was long treated as an embarrassing aberration from the poet's lifelong commitment to African American folk culture, has now moved to center stage in his critical reception, as scholars such as James Smethurst, Anthony Dawahare, William J. Maxwell, Kate Baldwin, Cary Nelson, and David Chioni Moore have positioned Hughes as a major figure in complex international and interracial circuits of experimental, proletarian writing. And critics such as Brent Hayes Edwards and Vera Kutzinski have begun to pay serious attention to Hughes's work both as a translator and in translation. Kutzinski's recent Worlds of Langston Hughes makes a strong case that Hughes's status as the most famous US poet of the twentieth century in Latin America needs more critical notice, and posits Hughes as a key proponent of a fringe modernism which flourished in spaces worldwide in which we find avant-garde literary practices typically excluded from modernist studies for being too 'transparent,' too 'realistic,' too 'ethnic,' or too 'political'--or simply for using languages other than English (8). Hughes, for so long faulted for being--like his most famous fictional character--Simple, has in recent years come to seem anything but. David Chinitz's Which Sin to Bear? is as much a meditation on this altered critical terrain as it is a consideration of two of the most persistent issues in Hughes's reception--the racial of his vernacular writing, and the ethics of his political transition from communist fellow-traveler in the 1930s to co-operative witness at Joseph McCarthy's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953. In addressing the former, Chinitz--like most recent scholars--is more interested in how (and why) criteria of racial are formulated than in how well or poorly a writer conforms to them. And Hughes emerges here as the defining figure in establishing racial authenticity as a supreme criterion of African American literature (12), a criterion which would be endorsed in the Black Arts era and again in the vernacular-centered black literary criticism of the 1980s epitomized by the scholarship of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Houston Baker. signal exhibit in Hughes's establishment of that criterion is his most famous essay, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain; rooting the culture of authentic blackness in the black working class, this essay also influentially faulted an emergent urban black middle class for its racial self-loathing and its aping of white aesthetic standards. …

"Plotting" the Story of Race: Pedagogy Challenges in History and Literature

IN A FREQUENTLY CITED passage from his essay, “Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity” (1953), Ralph Ellison invokes the centrality of race in the narrative of the United States as a nation by proposing that “we view the whole of American life as a drama acted upon the body of a Negro giant, who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon which and within which the action unfolds.” Most African Americanists know from their classroom experience how even short pieces such as W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Conservation of Races” (1897) or “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” (the opening chapter in Souls of Black Folk [1903]) or “Souls of White Folk” (1910), Randolph Bourne’s “Trans-National America” (1916), Marita Bonner’s “On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored” (1925), Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926), Wallace Thurman’s “Nephews of Uncle Remus” (1927), Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928), Ellison’s “What America Would Be Like without Blacks” (1970)—or, for that matter, Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” (1989)—can convey the layered complexity of “race” in the United States. Some of our students, like us, can come away from any one or two of these essays with humility and appreciation for the insights and provocations they comprise. Along with scores of films and countless discursive and fictional writings, these very teachable essays show the challenges involved in climbing the steep and treacherous terrains of the racial mountain. Faced with the mountain, all of us—scholars of literature, history, anthropology, political science, and sociology alike—can benefit immensely from the new understandings of race that interdisciplinary, interethnic, femi-

Groundings with My Mentor: Remembering Manning Marable

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Manning Marable, Beyond Black and White: Transforming African-American Politics (New York: Verso, 1995), xvi. Thank you to Russell J. Rickford for bringing this quote to my attention. Manning, Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society (United Kingdom: Pluto Press, 2000), xv. Manning Marable, “Introduction: Black Studies and the Racial Mountain,” in Manning Marable, ed., Dispatches from Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the African American Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 2. See Sojourner Ruth Marable, “The Cincinnati Boys must not Die: Over-the-Rhine Perspectives and Newspaper Framing of the April 2001 Cincinnati Uprising” (MA Thesis, Penn State University, 2003). Manning Marable, Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–1990 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), 4. Midterm in possession of author. Henry Louis Gates, “Manning Marable: In Memoriam,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 4, 2011. http://chronicle.com/blogs/pageview/manning-marable-in-memoriam/28425 (accessed April 8, 2011). Thank you to LeShane D. Lindsey for bringing this article to my attention. Email in possession of author. Manning, Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society (United Kingdom: Pluto Press, 2000), xv.

Splay Anthem

Reviewed by: Splay Anthem Matt Sandler (bio) Mackey, Nathaniel. Splay Anthem. New York: New Directions, 2006. Poetry prizes are notoriously unreliable indicators of literary endurance. Committees tend not to reward the sort of innovative work that appeals to later generations. Exceptions to this rule tend to take readers of adventurous poetry by surprise, even when they are confident of their most accomplished poets’ deserving talent. Such has been the case with Nathaniel Mackey’s most recent collection, which encountered the unusual fate of being given the National Book Award in 2006. His work fits Ron Silliman’s category of “post-avant”—the disparate array of experimental poetries broken off from the Romantic [End Page 1378] idea of artistic progress at the turn of the twentieth century. Such poetry rarely receives the kind of recognition Mackey’s has over the last few years. The vibrantly skewed relation to time in his writing should be the stuff of some debate, if they have poetic justice in the future. This watershed volume brings together two long poetic cycles begun in his earliest publications in the 1970s: Song of Andoumboulou and “Mu.” Each of the ongoing serial poems is numbered (though Mackey skips a few numbers along the way). In Splay Anthem, “Mu” goes from its fifteenth to the thirty-eighth parts, while Song goes from number 40 to number 60. They are interwoven, or braided together, rather than placed in sections, to emphasize their shared ambience. Mackey explains the overlap of the two projects in a preface—itself a virtuosic work of self-criticism. The Andoumboulou are, in the Dogon cosmology, “not simply a failed, or flawed, earlier form of human being, but a rough draft of human being, the work-inprogress we continue to be” (xi). Likewise, “Mu” refers to, among other things, the lost continent. So the meeting of these two works constitutes what Robert Duncan has called in grand seriousness, a “world-poem,” but a specifically utopic and prehistoric world. Splay Anthem is a “blue gnostic / loop,” a choral return to creative origins that echoes back to the future (40). Its sources have an improvised philological quality. Mackey’s exuberant cultural appetite runs from experimental American poetry to history, linguistics, anthropology, and ethnomusicology. Never with the blowhard attitudinizing of Poe, Pound, or Olson, all of whom have nevertheless left their mark here, Mackey’s learning slants with the impossibility of his subject. The poems ring with the kind of extra-historical consumption of history that characterizes Flaubert’s North African epic Salammbo, with its crucified lions and perfumed earrings. Mackey offers a latter day cornucopia of literary pleasures—”fig liquor” (64) and an “armadillo-back / mandolin” (32). The distance of his imaginary world frames a critique of “the flailing imperial republic of Nub the United States has become” (xv). For the bombast of this statement, the social critique in the poetry itself remains largely implicit. The historical estrangement staged by the premise allows for moments of echoing reportage: Bullets flew, bombs fell outside, century’s end as andoumboulouous as ever. (17) Here one of the poem’s keywords is redeployed as an adjective at “century’s end,” suggesting that, despite or perhaps because of the temporal obliquities of the poetry, we might think of our own moment within its terms. Likewise in the poem’s geography, the displacement of “Mu” opens up the possibility for strange new views of the contemporary. For instance, many of Mackey’s impossible juxtapositions reconstruct a ghostly solidarity between African American and Arabic cultures. Where else but “Mu” could it be said that “Abbey Lincoln sang a Sufi lament,” or “jooked oud everywhere” (119, 88)? The post-avant politics of what he calls, following Duke Ellington, his “blutopia,” are fundamentally wandering, as much projection as [End Page 1379] protest. The ethnic determinants of his writing are much less explicit than will be familiar to readers accustomed to thinking around Langston Hughes’s “racial mountain.” Mackey heads toward theorizing a sort of post-racial aesthetic, and his work travels: “It was Egypt or Tennessee / we / were in” (55). Splay Anthem is never facile though, always in touch with violence and poverty for all its achieved avant...

La « Montagne raciale » : et après ? Parcours identitaires dans deux romans ghanéens contemporains

Afro-American poet Langston’s Hughes’s challenge to the "Negro artist" in 1926—to run away from "the race towards whiteness" and climb the "racial mountain" in order to "discover himself and his people" reverberated throughout the colonial and later postcolonial world. Echoes of his plea have long been found in West African literary works concerned with restoring a positive image of the black self, but other "mountains" to be conquered have more recently come into view, especially in women’s writings. Two Ghanaian novels, Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint (1977), by Ama Ata Aidoo, and Beyond the Horizon (1995), by Amma Darko, illustrate some transformations of the issue raised by Hughes

Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion to Invisible Man (review)

Reviewed by: Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion to Invisible Man Sara Blair Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion to Invisible Man. Lucas E. Morel , ed. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2004. Pp. xii + 249. $24.95 (paper). If politics makes strange bedfellows, the project of reading for politics makes for useful estrangement. In this carefully constructed anthology, a raft of contributors—whose disciplines include classics, political theory, history, and law as well as English—argue for what editor Lucas Morel calls "the political artistry" of Ellison's landmark novel (1). That such recovery should be necessary may be surprising, but it responds to longstanding critique of Ellison as a political refusenik (he preferred not to enter into civil rights activism) and belated modernist (someone who valued the commitment to artistry above that to a community or people). In ten essays, with prologue and epilogue—a structure miming that of Invisible Man—the volume seeks to explore the full range of Ellison's commitments to individualism, liberation, and his chosen form, making his politics available for riffs and reconsiderations in the best Ellisonian fashion. Some of these essays will interest literary scholars for the view from elsewhere they adopt. James Seaton's exploration of the mysterious "principle" affirmed at the end of Invisible Man and William Nash's reading of the evolution of Ellison's politics as an extension of Emerson's famous question "How shall I live?" frame the difficulties and benefits of reading across disciplinary boundaries. More extensively, Morel explores the meaning to Ellison of democratic (or what might be called Emersonian) individualism as a project inseparable from his struggle "to get the Negro into the written record of American history" (62). From the perspective of political theory, key incidents and tropes of Invisible Man—for example, the placement of Tod Clifton's funeral in Mt. Morris Park, in a nod toward Langston Hughes's "racial mountain," or the description of the funeral crowd as the "boil[ing]" contents of a fraught melting pot—attest to Ellison's investment in the democratic subject as such, and in the power of Invisible Man as [End Page 781] "a book for citizens" (77). Likewise, Thomas Engeman's essay on the novel as a quest for racial justice begins with Ellison's investment in the productive conflicts of a democratic society, but argues for a sharp distinction between Invisible Man and the uncompleted Juneteenth; finally, for Engeman, Ellison comes to understand that "the kind of … social knowledge required to help liberate others" is possible only in the context of Christian belief (93). Here, as throughout, one might wish for discussion of the relations between the political and the social as informing categories; in any case, the argument for Ellison's conversion to Christian communitarianism is clearly at odds with both his private writings and the tenor of Juneteenth, whose brand of redemption, as personified by the Reverend A. Z. Hickman, is steeped in hard-fought social experience and culture rather than theology. More convincing with respect to spirituality is Marc Conner's essay on sacrament and history in Invisible Man, which argues for Ellison's interest in material objects as transformative, capable of altering received notions of time, history, and political agency. Focusing on the "enchanting force" of objects in the novel as reflective of sacramental thinking, Conner succeeds in probing the force of Ellison's narrative form. Formally constructed around such key objects as the freedom papers of the eviction scene, the novel achieves the effect of Walter Benjamin's famously dialectical image ("image is dialectic at a standstill" [173]), creating for its readers the experience of oscillation between "a new sense of the past and a new sense of the present" (173)—a not unmeaningful act in the context of the novel's emergence and reception. Another standout essay is Danielle Allen's reading of "the tragi-comedy of citizenship" (37), which begins not by taking politics as an interpretive category for granted but by raising the very problem of definition. Clearly, she notes, readers are "not meant to focus on events and institutions" as the source of meaningful...

The State of the Hip-Hop Generation: How Hip-Hop’s Cultural Movement is Evolving into Political Power

The question of the role of Black art has long faced African American artists. It was addressed by Langston Hughes in his 1926 ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’. It was raised again during the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s and many times in between, before and since. For young African Americans today, several important variables have helped raise this question anew, albeit in bold and curious ways.

Respecting the Folk

Respecting the Folk Roland L. Williams Jr. (bio) The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Volume 4, ed. Arnold Rampersad. University of Missouri Press, 2001. 2001. 344 pp. $29.95. American society has produced not many authors as versatile as Langston Hughes. Born in Joplin, Missouri, during 1902, yet raised by his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas, after his parents divorced, he began to write poems in high school. While books became his best friends, a dreary year at Columbia University drove him to doubt their worth and drop out of school. He dropped his library overboard when he started a stint as a merchant marine, but literature had a hold on him that he could never shake. Eventually, Hughes resumed college at Lincoln University, where he settled on a literary career that yielded volumes of poetry which have garnered continuous acclaim. Often forgotten, however, is the fact that, before his death in 1967, he also published autobiography, criticism, drama, fiction, and journalism, along with children’s stories. Collected, his writings form a mosaic of the black experience in his lifetime, worthy of constant recognition. A philosophy of black art articulated at the height of the Harlem Renaissance inspired his work. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” relates the logic that guided his choice of subjects and themes. Printed in a 1926 issue of The Nation, the essay encourages African-American artists to resist a tendency among the black bourgeoisie to idolize white culture. In the piece, Hughes advises fellow black artists to mine the dreams and dealings of “the low-down folks, the so-called common element,” individuals who relish gin and jazz, shout their religion, and soften their sorrows with laughter. He advocated this approach with the belief that it would fulfill an obligation to raise respect for folkways. Hughes stayed true to that outlook. Rhymes and rhythms, images and idioms, principles and plots gathered from black folk life fill his first book of verse, The Weary Blues (1926). In The Big Sea (1940), the earliest of two autobiographies, recording his struggle to forge an identity, the narrator confesses that the concept behind his initial novel grew from a wish “to write about a typical Negro family in the Middle West.” Ironically, entitled the Ways of White Folks (1934), his original collection of short stories highlight the ways in which humble blacks have braved the color bar in the twentieth century. The writer created a classic folk figure in the persona of Jesse B. Semple, who speaks his mind in a series of columns written by Hughes for the Chicago Defender over a span of twenty years. His work for children, beginning in 1932 with Popo and Fifina, in addition to his Broadway play Mulatto, which opened in 1935, features topics and motifs that foster pride among blacks. Hughes maintained the same sense of mission prior to his death, when he drafted nearly the last of better thirty-five books, a history of the NAACP, Fight for Freedom (1962). Until recently, the bulk of his material faced extinction. As his reputation came to rest on [End Page 532] his poetry, his other work passed out of print. Fortunately, the University of Missouri has come to the rescue. For twelve years, Beverly Jarrett, chief editor at the university press, labored to negotiate permission to issue a comprehensive compilation of Hughes’s writings. Consequently, in June 2001, the Missouri University Press was able to release the first few of an eighteen-volume set titled The Complete Works of Langston Hughes. Three in number, the initial group, edited by Arnold Rampersad, contains poetry written over close to half a century. Jarrett expects to have the rest of the collection available by the date of the author’s hundredth birthday. The fourth volume in the series appeared a month after the first ones. It consists of Hughes’s two published novels. There is Not without Laughter (1930), a wry bildüngsroman about a poor black boy named Sandy, who aspires to rise in society for the good of blacks with the assistance of learning. The accompanying narrative, Tambourines to Glory (1958), paints a bittersweet portrait of two women who lift themselves out of...

Black studies and the racial mountain

Black studies and the racial mountain

Glory Bound: Black Athletes in a White America.

African-American athletes have experienced a tumultuous relationship with mainstream white America. Glory Bound brings together 11 essays that explore this complex topic by sports studies scholar David K. Wiggins. In his writings, Wiggins recounts the struggle of black athletes to climb their racial mountain - their struggle to fully participate in sport while maintaining their own cultural identity and pride. Wiggins examines other seminal moments that defined and changed the black athlete's role in white America, from the 19th century to the present: the personal crusade of Wendell Smith to promote black participation in organized baseball, the triumph of Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics and the proposed boycott of the Games, and the response of America's black press and community. Glory Bound demonstrates how the civil rights movement changed the face of American athletics and society forever. With the genesis of the black power movement in sport, Wiggins notes a significant shift in black - and white - America's attention to the African-American athlete. In his final and newest essay, he examines the writings of Edwin B. Henderson, the father of black sport history, who wrote the first books on African-American involvement in sport.

Enter, the Tribe of Woman

Enter, the Tribe of Woman Opal J. Moore (bio) There is a desperate need in our time for the Negro writer to assume a partisanship in . . . the war against the illusions of one’s time and culture. (131) Lorraine Hansberry, “The Negro Writer, His Roots: Toward a New Romanticism” We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. (91) Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” DIVA 3 Once I was a girl like you who hid her booty from the world but then I learned a thing or two. I walk the earth propelled from behind, the power source. Elizabeth Alexander, Diva Studies The millennium approaches. Upon everyone’s lips is one question: how will we continue? We search for the meaning or possibility (or impossibility) of our continued existence in the arbitrary marker of an invented Time. Sometimes I read magazines like Harper’s to find out what crimes white people are confessing. Recently, I came upon two essays by white men shaping their fear of an encroaching artistic irrelevance as a question: what is the future of the novel, of the book arts in an age where reading is in decline? A fair question. One of the essayists, bemoaning the fluidity of modern techno-culture, and bravely seeking a reason to continue his own habit of reading and writing, notes that “women and cultural minorities” are the only artists who have found “in the face of hyperkinetic televised reality” an artistic referential territory that does not shift and change every six months, i.e., before the book manuscript can be sold and published. This territory, he claims, is “the author’s membership in a tribe” (Franzen 47). I had been in sympathy with the writer’s analysis until this stunning conclusion made me realize that this white male writer had situated himself and his artistic world completely outside of the artistic strivings and concerns of “women and cultural minorities.” He seemed to be suggesting that “they” have exercised some kind of unfair advantage over “mainstream” (white male?) writers who, presumably, had no tribal territories of their own. (One has to ask, are gay and “queer” writers, some of whom are white, creating a post-modern [End Page 340] (multi-ethnic) “tribal” territory upon which they may ground future fictions? Will it shift before their books can be made into movies?) The writer’s selection of the word tribal as a way of describing the place, vision and art of contemporary “marginalized” writers was obviously deliberate and considered. I had not realized that Toni Morrison’s Beloved or Alice Walker’s The Color Purple had garnered Pulitzers and worldwide audiences because they had managed to locate themselves within a tribal space, inside some sort of barricaded containment of identity that would not veer off or dislocate before the prizes could be awarded. If white men are in fear of their artistic obsolescence or their disaffection for reading the stories of their times, it may be due to their mental and emotional ghettoization, the refusal or inability to recognize the relevance to themselves, and to the world, of the writerly projects of women and cultural minorities. One of these projects has been the disruption, rather than the erection (a deliberate word), of traditional notions of separation—the transgressing of artificial borders of race, class, gender, nation. Pain, Toni Morrison might observe, has no margin, no beginning or end, no country. If black women had merely been writing stories of (or out of) their tribal identity, what could explain the attraction for their culturally, sexually, racially, nationally diverse readership? Perhaps this is the accomplishment of black women and their sisters under the skin; perhaps it is the territory of the artist for the year 2000 and beyond: the creation of a story that references us all. Enter, the Tribe of Woman. Way back yander. In dem times we ‘uz all un us black; we ‘uz all niggers tergedder, en ‘cordin’ ter all de ‘counts w’at I years fokes ‘uz gittin ‘long ‘bout ez well in dem days ez day is now. “Why the Negro is Black” (Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus) In the tale, the negro is black...

Heroic "Hussies" and "Brilliant Queers": Genderracial Resistance in the Works of Langston Hughes

In his writings, Langston Hughes explores convergence of race and gender in Black men's and women's lives, questioning binary constructions of identity and exploring sensuality in relation to social change. These are pages, as bell hooks suggests, that lay marked on bedside tables, that become worn with searching fingers, that represent something other than the Langston Hughes most folks read or remember (193). They are poems and stories that deal with love among Black men and women, nature, romantic quandary, mother-daughter and fatherson relations, friendship, and silences. In discussing Black male and female identity, Hughes speaks of ways gender uniquely colors these experiences. He writes in a manner which could be described as genderracial, emphasizing how gender and racial identity are intertwined. In an often cited passage from Negro Artist and Racial Mountain, Hughes comments, One of most promising of young Negro poets said to me once, 'I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet.' ... I was sorry young man said that, for no great has ever been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then, that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet (692). To Hughes, identity is inseparable from, and indeed central to, one's artistry. His work is strengthened by a poetic imagination which enters of those with varying experiences. Hughes's images are at times disturbing, also comforting, alternately sad and joyous, and directly connected to his identity as a Black man who heard voices of many--white and of Color, male and female, gay and straight, within and without himself. Hughes and Black Consciousness Suggesting a useful approach to Hughes's genderracial concerns, Frances Beale's 1970 essay Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female comments on tendency of social movements to privilege one liberation struggle over another in their vision of change. She cites women's movement's dismissal of Black women's concerns in their drive to advance status of white women, and Black Power's assertion of Black manhood through subordination of Black women. And she queries, Are there any parallels between this struggle and movement on part of Black women for total emancipation? (98). Deborah King expands on Beale and borrows from W. E. B. Du Bois's theory of double to describe Black women's multiple consciousness (Multiple 292). She concurs that the gender-only perspective alone is insufficient for understanding Black female oppression (Race 4) and asserts a form of which occupies a both/and holistic orientation (9), a which she identifies as polyrhythmic. Drawing connections between African and African American expressive art forms and Black consciousness, King explains: For Black women, interrelationship among strips of strong contrast in multiple, counter rhythms which produces music, ... dance or quilts replicates interdependence of individuals and other elements of cosmos, all of which have strong, contrasting natures in an ever-changing yet stable whole (Race 10). Gender and race converge for Hughes's female characters, who confront genderracial myths in their exploration of identity. bell hooks notes that Hughes often invokes voice of a Black woman, and that he appears comfortable in this fictive transvestism (194). In Southern Mammy Sings, Hughes takes on a female voice to contrast genderracial stereotype of mammy with reality of Black domestic work: Miss Gardner's in her garden Miss Yardman's in her yard Miss Michaelmas is at de mass And I am gettin' tired! Lawd! I am gettin' tired! (Selected 162) The form of poem indicates blues as muscial form representative of a Black woman's experience working in white folks' kitchens, contrasting sharply with images of cheerful, singing mammy seen in minstrel show or on big screen, and in literature. …

Do Right to Write Right: Langston Hughes's Aesthetics of Simplicity

one thing most readers of twentieth-century American poetry can say about Langston Hughes is that he has known rivers. The Negro Speaks of Rivers has become memorable for its lofty, oratorical tone, mythic scope, and powerful rhythmic repetitions: I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. (1656) But however beautiful its cadences, the poem is remembered primarily because it is Hughes's most frequently anthologized work. fact is, The Negro Speaks of Rivers is one of Hughes's most uncharacteristic poems, and yet it has defined his reputation, along with a small but constant selection of other poems included in anthologies. Negro Speaks of Rivers, House in Taos, The Weary Blues, Montage of a Dream Deferred, Theme for English B, Refugee in America, and I, Too--these poems invariably comprise his anthology repertoire despite the fact that none of them typifies his writing. What makes these poems atypical is exactly what makes them appealing and intelligible to the scholars who edit anthologies--their complexity. True, anthologies produced in the current market, which is hospitable to the African-American tradition and to canon reform, now include a brief selection of poems in black folk forms. But even though Hughes has fared better in anthologies than most African-American writers, only a small and predictable segment of his poetry has been preserved. A look back through the original volumes of poetry, and even through the severely redrawn Selected Poems, reveals a wealth of simpler poems we ought to be reading.(1) Admittedly, an account of Hughes's poetic simplicity requires some qualification. Most obvious is the fact that he wrote poems that are not simple. Negro Speaks of Rivers is oracular; The Weary concludes enigmatically; House in Taos is classically modernist in both its fragmented form and its decadent sensibility. Even more to the point, many of the poems that have been deemed simple are only ironically so. The Black Christ, for example, is a little jingle that invokes monstrous cultural complexity. Likewise, two later books, Ask Your Mama (1961) and Panther and the Lash (1967), contain an intricate vision of American history beneath their simple surfaces.(2) Nevertheless, the overwhelming proportion of poems in the Hughes canon consists of in the simpler style; and even those poems that can yield complexities make use of simplicity in ways that ought not to be ignored. repression of the bulk of Hughes's poems is the result of chronic critical scorn for their simplicity. Throughout his long career, but especially after his first two volumes of poetry (readers were at first willing to assume that a youthful poet might grow to be more complex), his books received their harshest reviews for a variety of flaws that all originate in an aesthetics of simplicity. From his first book, Weary Blues (1926), to his last one, Panther and the Lash (1967), the reviews invoke a litany of faults: the poems are superficial, infantile, silly, small, unpoetic, common, jejune, iterative, and, of course, simple.(3) Even his admirers reluctantly conclude that Hughes's poetics failed. Saunders Redding flatly opposes simplicity and artfulness: While Hughes's rejection of his own growth shows an admirable loyalty to his self-commitment as the poet of the 'simple, Negro commonfolk' . . . it does a disservice to his art (Mullen 74). James Baldwin, who recognizes the potential of simplicity as an artistic principle, faults the poems for tak|ing~ refuge . . . in a fake simplicity in order to avoid the very difficult simplicity of the experience (Mullen 85). Despite a lifetime of critical disappointments, then, Hughes remained loyal to the aesthetic program he had outlined in 1926 in his decisive poetic treatise, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain. There he had predicted that the common people would give to this world its truly Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself, a poet who would explore the great field of unused |folk~ material ready for his art and recognize that this source would provide sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work (692). …

How Langston Hughes Used the Blues

When Alfred Knopf published Fine Clothes to a Jew1 in 1927, Langston Hughes became one of the most innovative voices in American poetry and the first poet in the world to transform the idioms of blues and jazz into poetic verse. He himself was demonstrating what he had called for in The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, published in 1926. Hughes suggested that creative individualism should be the guiding esthetic value for the black artist. Speaking on behalf of his contemporaries of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes proclaimed: