Proletarian Plays for a Proletarian Audience: Langston Hughes and Harvest

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 475-493
Author(s):  
Catherine Peckinpaugh Vrtis
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Harris Feinsod

This chapter introduces the unlikely roles poets played at the center of hemispheric cultural diplomacy initiatives in 1938–1945, the years when Good Neighbor diplomacy was motivated by a broad antifascist coalition. The chapter discusses major diplomat-poets like William Carlos Williams, Pablo Neruda, Archibald MacLeish, and Langston Hughes, and compares these writers to Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos, Ecuadorian Consul General Jorge Carrera Andrade, soldier-poet Lysander Kemp, and others who coalesced around the anthologies, translations, and congresses of Good Neighbor initiatives. Borrowing metaphors of bridging and broadcasting from new infrastructures of hemispheric modernization, and invoking strategies of apostrophic address to an impossibly large hemispheric public, Good Neighbor poetry promoted Popular Front antifascism, but also enabled advocates of decolonial politics, racial democracy, and international feminism.


Callaloo ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 1137-1137
Author(s):  
Yusef Komunyakaa
Keyword(s):  

1985 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 54-60
Author(s):  
Carmen Alegría ◽  
Robert Chrisman

Books Abroad ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 580
Author(s):  
Suhail ibn-Salim Hanna ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Muhammad Bakir Alwan
Keyword(s):  

1984 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 134
Author(s):  
Bettina Drew ◽  
Faith Berry
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Eric B. White

Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic provides a new account of aesthetic and technological innovation, from the Machine Age to the Information Age. Drawing on a wealth of archival discoveries, it argues that modernist avant-gardes used technology not only as a means of analysing culture, but as a way of feeding back into it. As well as uncovering a new invention by Mina Loy, the untold story of Bob Brown’s ‘reading machine’ and the radical technicities of African American experimentalists including Gwendolyn Bennett, Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes, the book places avant-gardes at the centre of innovation across a variety of fields. From dazzle camouflage to microfilm, and from rail networks to broadcast systems, White explores how vanguardists harnessed socio-technics to provoke social change. Reading Machines argues that transatlantic avant-gardes deployed ‘techno-bathetic’ strategies to contest the dominance of the technological sublime. This major but hidden cultural narrative engaged with the messy particulars and unintended consequences of technology’s transduction in society. Techno-bathetic vanguardists including Futurists, Vorticists, Dadaists, post-Harlem Renaissance radicals and American Super-realists proposed new, non-servile ways of reading and doing technology. The books reveals how these formations contested the entrenched hierarchies of both the transatlantic Machine Age and technological sublime.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document