Memoirs of "When the Negro was in Vogue": Langston Hughes, Black Intellectualism and the African American Autobiographical Tradition

CLA Journal ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 237-257
Author(s):  
Christopher Allen Varlack
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Langston Hughes

Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric B. White
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Information Age ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Mina Loy ◽  
Cultural Narrative ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Technological Sublime

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.

Gwendolyn Bennett's “The Ebony Flute”

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (3) ◽  
pp. 744-755
Author(s):  
Belinda Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
African American ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
Assistant Editor ◽  
Cover Art ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

IntroductionGwendolyn Bennett (1902-81) is often mentioned in books that discuss the harlem renaissance, and some of her poems Occasionally appear in poetry anthologies; but much of her career has been overlooked. Along with many of her friends, including Jessie Redmond Fauset, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen, Bennett was featured at the National Urban League's Civic Club Dinner in March 1924, an event that would later be “widely hailed as a ‘coming out party’ for young black artists, writers, and intellectuals whose work would come to define the Harlem Renaissance” (McHenry 383n100). In the next five years Bennett published over forty poems, short stories, and reviews in leading African American magazines and anthologies, such as Cullen's Caroling Dusk (1927) and William Stanley Braithwaite's Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1927; she created magazine cover art that adorned two leading African American periodicals, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races and the National Urban League's Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life; she worked as an editor or assistant editor of several magazines, including Opportunity, Black Opals, and Fire!; and she wrote a renowned literary column, “The Ebony Flute.” Many scholars, such as Cary Wintz, Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson, and Elizabeth McHenry, recognized the importance of Bennett's column to the Harlem Renaissance in their respective studies, but their emphasis on a larger Harlem Renaissance discussion did not afford a detailed examination of her column.

‘Our Technology Was Vernacular’: Radical Technicities in African American Experimental Writing

2020 ◽  
pp. 214-264
Author(s):  
Eric B. White
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Experimental Writing ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Black Vernacular ◽  
Spatial Practice ◽  
Industrial Modernity ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Definition Of

Chapter 5 focuses on technicities of African American vanguardists, including Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Ralph Ellison and Amiri Baraka. These writers joined the civil rights lawyer and writer Pauli Murray in recognising illegal rail travel and other appropriations of infrastructure as signifyin(g) spatial practices. Building on research by sociologists, historians of technology and literary critics, the chapter uses a techno-bathetic framework to explore how railroads became signifyin(g) machines for the everyday technicities of black life throughout the twentieth century. The long-running crises sparked by the Scottsboro trials encouraged African American avant-gardes to formulate a vernacular, counter-servile technicity that served as a hinge between rhetorical and spatial practice. When Ellison claimed that ‘[o]ur technology was vernacular’, the shared valences he identifies between language, technology and strategies of adaptation and appropriation elides closely with Rayvon Fouché’s conception of ‘black vernacular technological creativity’ and Henry Louis Gates, Jr’s definition of motivated signifyin(g). African American vanguardists dragged the invisible and over-determined rail networks, and the spaces that framed them, back into plain sight, and made them the targets of sustained attack. The chapter argues that by doing so, these writers practiced a nuanced vernacular technicity articulated across the longue durée of industrial modernity.

Douglas, Aaron (1899–1979)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catrina Hill
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Library ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
African Art ◽  
Illustrated Books ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
New York Public Library ◽  
Tribal Art ◽  
American Artists ◽  
African American Artists

Aaron Douglas was an African American artist and educator often referred to as the father of "Black Art." He was a leading figure of the artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Douglas is best known for his work of the 1920s and 1930s, which featured abstracted silhouettes combined with African tribal art and ancient Egyptian profile heads. European artists like Matisse, Modigliani and Picasso had been influenced by African tribal art for decades, but Douglas was among the first African American artists to blend African art with modern abstraction. Douglas produced illustrations for such magazines as The Crisis, Survey Graphic and Opportunity along with co-founding the short-lived Fire!! A Quarterly Journal Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists. He also illustrated books by several well-known literary figures, including Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay. He is recognized for several public murals, including the Birth o’ the Blues at the Sherman Hotel in Chicago, Evolution of Negro Dance at the Harlem YMCA, and Aspects of Negro Life at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. As a professor of fine art Douglas encouraged generations of African American artists to create their own modern Black aesthetic.

Along the Streets of Bronzeville

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Gwendolyn Brooks ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
Chicago Renaissance ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
State Street ◽  
American Authors ◽  
South Side Chicago

This book examines the flowering of African American creativity, activism, and scholarship in the South Side Chicago district known as Bronzeville during the period between the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Poverty stricken, segregated, and bursting at the seams with migrants, Bronzeville was the community that provided inspiration, training, and work for an entire generation of diversely talented African American authors and artists who came of age during the years between the two world wars. This book investigates the institutions and streetscapes of Black Chicago that fueled an entire literary and artistic movement. It argues that African American authors and artists—such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, painter Archibald Motley, and many others—viewed and presented black reality from a specific geographic vantage point: the view along the streets of Bronzeville. The book explores how the particular rhythms and scenes of daily life in Bronzeville locations, such as the State Street “Stroll” district or the bustling intersection of 47th Street and South Parkway, figured into the creative works and experiences of the artists and writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance.

The Virtuosity of Langston Hughes: Persona, Rhetoric, and Iconography in The Weary Blues

2020 ◽  
Vol 81 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-94
Author(s):  
Michael Skansgaard
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
American Vernacular ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Orthodox View ◽  
New System

Abstract Previous historical studies of The Weary Blues have focused on the racial symbolism of Langston Hughes’s technique, which (as the consensus goes) authenticates the voice of the persona through its deliberate simplicity. This orthodox view is wrongheaded from the outset. The essay uses a new system of rhetorically driven scansion to identify elaborate rhetorical symmetries and polyrhythms that shape the cognition of Hughes’s persona and the recognition of his readers in ways that prose language cannot. Hughes employs rhetoric and iconography as alternative modes of historical narration. This recuperation of his persona intervenes in an ongoing dispute in the field of historical poetics about the value of formalism and cognitivism. The essay aims to show that the concept of thinking in verse is valuable where it has been least applied: in reclaiming the value of traditionally marginalized literatures such as those of the African American vernacular tradition.

scholarly journals Musical Tradition and Cultural Vision in Langston Hughes’s Poetry

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 41-45
Author(s):  
Lekha Nath Dhakal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Gospel Music ◽  
American Music ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Academic Field ◽  
Concert Music ◽  
Musical Tradition

In American music, Langston Hughes is one of the literary figures that hold a place similar to the aforementioned luminaries. In the literary field, Hughes is respected as one of the most important figures of the twentieth century. With the rise of African American Studies as an academic field in the 1970s, his life, writing, and influence has received frequent attention. What has not been documented in more specific terms is his importance to America’s musical culture in the twentieth century. Whether directly or indirectly, Langston Hughes has been a fixture in American musical culture, both popular and concert music, since the 1920s. In addition to his personal affinity for blues, jazz and other specifically African American musical forms such as gospel music, his vast contribution to American music specifically and American music culture in a broader sense can be separated into four general categories.

scholarly journals Jim Crow Laws in Langston Hughes’ “Breakfast in Virginia” and “Trouble with the Angels”

Lexicon ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Listiyaningsih Listiyaningsih
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Secondary Data ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Public Places ◽  
Public Facilities

This graduating paper analyzes Jim Crow laws as reflected in Langston Hughes’ short stories “Breakfast in Virginia” and “Trouble with the Angels”. This study aims to identify the practice of Jim Crow laws as seen in “Breakfast in Virginia” and “Trouble with the Angels”. This graduating paper applies mimetic theory proposed by Abrams since it is the most suitable approach to be used to analyze the connection between the literary work and the reality. There are two types of data which are used in this paper. The primary data are the short stories entitled, “Breakfast in Virginia” and “Trouble with the Angels”. Meanwhile, the secondary data are the references that support the analysis and are taken from the internet browsing.Based on the data analysis, this research concludes that segregation is the practice of Jim Crow laws in these two short stories. The segregations are clearly seen mostly in public places. In “Breakfast in Virginia” the segregations happen in the train, specifically in Jim Crow car and in the dining car in Virginia. Meanwhile, in “Trouble with the Angels” the segregations are clearly visible in the hotel and in the theater in Washington. In “Breakfast in Virginia” the segregations are faced by African American soldiers during World War II. Meanwhile, in “Trouble with the Angels” the segregations are experienced by African American actors and the other African American citizens of Washington. These two short stories show that Jim Crow laws made African Americans life getting worse, especially in public places. Both in “Breakfast in Virginia” and in “Trouble with the Angels”, African Americans cannot use the same public facilities as the whites. They can only use public facilities specially provided for the African Americans which have improper conditions. During the practice of Jim Crow laws, their rights are denied. This is proved by the segregations that do not only restrict African Americans from middle or low class status but also restrict those who have a higher status regardless their influential contribution toAmerica. This condition is painful for them.

On Art and Such

2019 ◽  
pp. 84-118
Author(s):  
Cheryl A. Wall
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
African American ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Primary Site ◽  
Economic Progress ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter charts the debates on art and aesthetics that preoccupied writers during the Harlem Renaissance. It is argued that because African Americans had made slight political and economic progress they turned to the arts as the primary site for social justice. The questions generated by the ensuing aesthetic debates about the purpose of racial art, its form, its audience, and the efficacy of cultural difference, reverberated throughout the twentieth century. This chapter also analyzes the formal innovations made by African American essayists. It is shown through the examples of Alain Locke’s intellectual detachment, Langston Hughes’ fiery polemic, George Schuyler’s acerbic satire, and Zora Neale Hurston’s “jagged harmonies” that the essayists of the Harlem Renaissance both formulated and enacted the aesthetic they proposed in their writings.

Modernism and the Affects of Racial Blackness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindon Barrett
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
American Artists ◽  
African American Artists ◽  
George Schuyler ◽  
Focus Point ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter focuses on the dispute between two important figures of the Harlem Renaissance: George Schuyler and Langston Hughes. Schuyler's critique of the African American avant-garde in his essay “The Negro-Art Hokum” (1926) and Hughes's response in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) provide a focus point to understand how African American artists and intellectuals imagined their relationship both to Western modernization and avant-garde cultural modernism. This chapter stands as a separate essay from Barrett's surviving manuscript, as it appears to be intended for a different publication; its inclusion here is meant to supplement discussion from the previous chapters, although Schuyler and Hughes did not tackle the gender and sexuality aspects of Barrett's arguments so far posited in this book.

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