The chapter “Spectacles in Color” in Langston Hughes's first autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), envisions modernist Harlem culture as a drag performance and offers a useful rubric for understanding Hughes's The Weary Blues (1926), a lyric history of that culture whose poems characteristically cross gender, sexual, racial, and even formal lines. The Weary Blues employs a low-down, or nature-based, and down-low, or queer, aesthetic of racial and gender crossing that I term “primitive drag,” an aesthetic that ironically coincides with the stereotypes of African Americans and queers that were propagated by early-twentieth-century sexological science and degeneration theory: namely, that blacks and queers were unnatural and degenerate because they, unlike whites and heterosexuals, exhibited a lack of racial and gender differentiation. Disidentifying with those stereotypes, the primitive drag in The Weary Blues depicts queer feeling as natural and nature as queer, thus offering a productive paradox for rethinking literary histories of modernism and theories of sexuality by the rather Darwinian notion that “the nature of the universe,” as Hughes calls it, is always subject to change, or queering.
Book Review: Taming the Unknown - A History of Algebra from Antiquity to the Early Twentieth Century