40. THE BLUES: Richard Wright, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, William Styron

The Novel ◽  
2014 ◽  
pp. 950-968
Keyword(s):  
Richard Wright ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Jean Toomer ◽  
William Styron ◽  
Claude Mckay

scholarly journals “I’m Trying to be as Honest as I Can:” An Interview with James Baldwin (1969)

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-129
Author(s):  
Rich Blint ◽  
Nazar Büyüm
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Nation Of Islam ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
English Language Publication ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
American Blacks

This is the first English language publication of an interview with James Baldwin (1924–87) conducted by Nazar Büyüm in 1969, Istanbul, Turkey. Deemed too long for conventional publication at the time, the interview re-emerged last year and reveals Baldwin’s attitudes about his literary antecedents and influences such as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen; his views concerning the “roles” and “duties” of a writer; his assessment of his critics; his analysis of the power and message of the Nation of Islam; his lament about the corpses that are much of the history and fact of American life; an honest examination of the relationship of poor whites to American blacks; an interrogation of the “sickness” that characterizes Americans’ commitment to the fiction and mythology of “race,” as well as the perils and seductive nature of American power.

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.

The Aesthetics of Anticipation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margo Natalie Crawford
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Jean Toomer ◽  
Gwendolyn Brooks ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Black Aesthetics

The first chapter argues that black aesthetics pivot on the spirit of anticipation. The first section of this chapter focuses on the 1920 and 30s Harlem Renaissance anticipation of the Black Arts Movement. Crawford then shows how the Black Arts Movement anticipates the post-black maneuvers of the 21st century. This chapter examines literature written by Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Claudia Rankine, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others.

scholarly journals Beyond Understanding

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-95
Author(s):  
Rohan Ghatage
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Black Subject ◽  
Normative Value

This essay establishes a philosophical connection between James Baldwin and the philosopher William James by investigating how the pragmatist protocol against “vicious intellectualism” offers Baldwin a key resource for thinking through how anti-black racism might be dismantled. While Richard Wright had earlier denounced pragmatism for privileging experience over knowledge, and thereby offering the black subject no means for redressing America’s constitutive hierarchies, uncovering the current of Jamesian thought that runs through Baldwin’s essays brings into view his attempt to move beyond epistemology as the primary framework for inaugurating a future unburdened by the problem of the color line. Although Baldwin indicts contemporaneous arrangements of knowledge for producing the most dehumanizing forms of racism, he does not simply attempt to rewrite the enervating meanings to which black subjects are given. Articulating a pragmatist sensibility at various stages of his career, Baldwin repeatedly suggests that the imagining and creation of a better world is predicated upon rethinking the normative value accorded to knowledge in the practice of politics. The provocative challenge that Baldwin issues for his reader is to cease the well-established privileging of knowledge, and to instead stage the struggle for freedom within an aesthetic, rather than epistemological, paradigm.

The Silver Dream Accumulated

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Jackson
Keyword(s):  
William Faulkner ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Black Film ◽  
Thomas Dixon ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin

Chapter 3 is devoted to the film-related activities of southern literary figures. From nineteenth-century writers including Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe (not a southerner by birth, but, as author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a huge influence on southern literary history) to modern figures like Thomas Dixon, William Faulkner, Lillian Hellman, and the Nashville Agrarians, the southern literary tradition made myriad contributions to film. Faulkner’s screenwriting work provides perhaps the most engaging example. Meanwhile, the efforts of African American writers to make similar contributions were limited by the hard facts of Jim Crow, leaving such important figures as Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, among many others, to generate their own opportunities, often abroad, in a far more uneven fashion. Black film critics like Lester A. Walton also emerged as important literary figures.

Forms of Self-Representation in Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery

Prospects ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 201-222
Author(s):  
William E. Cain
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Public Life ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Henry Adams ◽  
Early Maturity ◽  
Explosive Energy ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Book Display

Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery (1901) is one of the most famous American autobiographies, yet it is unfortunately also one of the least analyzed. Compared with the American autobiographies that we frequently study and teach, it seems meager and unchallenging. Unlike Whitman and Thoreau, Washington does not propose experiments in form, and he does not undertake a profound inner exploration as his text unfolds. He is not keenly conscious of his competitive relation to the autobiographical writings that have preceded his own and unlike Henry Adams and Henry James, he does not manifest a high degree of selfreflective awareness about the act of telling the story of his life. Nor does Washington's book display the sophisticated rendering of personal and public life that W. E. B. DuBois manages in Dusk of Dawn (1940), the subtle and disturbing account of black adolescence and early maturity that Richard Wright crafts in Black Boy (1945), the stylistic vigor and intelligence that James Baldwin demonstrates in Notes of a Native Son (1955), or the explosive energy that Malcolm X unleashes in his autobiography (1965).

Langston Hughes: Fringe Modernism, Identity and Defying the Interrogator Witch-Hunter

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-179
Author(s):  
YOMNA SABER
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Black Life ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Many ◽  
Children's Stories

Langston Hughes (1902–67), the wondering wandering poet, has left behind a rich legacy of books that never grow dusty on the shelves. There seems to be no path that Hughes left untrodden; he wrote drama, novels, short stories, two autobiographies, poetry, journalistic prose, an opera libretto, history, children's stories, and even lyrics for songs, in addition to his translations. Hughes was the first African American author to earn his living from writing and his career spans a long time, from the 1920s until the 1960s – he never stopped writing during this period. The Harlem Renaissance introduced prominent black writers who engraved their names in the American canon, such as Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston, but Hughes markedly stands out for his artistic achievements and longer career. Hughes had been identified by many as the spokesperson for his race since his works dug deep into black life, and his innovative techniques embraced black dialect and the rhythms of black music. He captured the essence of black life with conspicuous sensitivity and polished his voice throughout four decades. His name also had long been tied to the politics of identity in America. Brooding over his position, Hughes chose to take pride in being black in a racist nation. In his case, the dialectics of identity are more complicated, as they encompass debates involving Africa, black nationalism and competing constructions surrounding a seeming authentic blackness, in addition to Du Bois's double consciousness. Critics still endeavour to decipher the many enigmas Hughes left unresolved, having been a private person and a controversial writer. His career continues to broach speculative questions concerning his closeted sexual orientation and his true political position. The beginning of the new millennium coincided with the centennial of his birth and heralded the advent of new well-researched scholarship on his life and works, including Emily Bernard's Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925–1964 (2001), Kate A. Baldwin's Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (2002), Anthony Dawahare's Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature between the Wars: A New Pandora's Box (2002), Bruce R. Schwartz's Langston Hughes: Working toward Salvation (2003), and John Edgar Tidwell and Cheryl R. Ragar's edited collection Montage of a Dream: The Art and Life of Langston Hughes (2007), among others.

An exotic subversive: Africa, Africans and the Soviet everyday

Race & Class ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 57-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxim Matusevich
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Soviet Culture ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Mixed Reaction

The Leninist argument, that the class struggle of the European proletariat was intertwined with the liberation of the `toiling masses of the East', led to an official ideology of Soviet internationalism in which Africans occupied a special place. Depictions of the evils of racism in the US became a staple of Soviet popular culture and a number of black radicals, among them Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson and Claude McKay, flocked to the Soviet Union in the 1920s-30s, inspired by the belief that a society free of racism had been created. While there was some truth to this view, people of African descent in the Soviet Union nevertheless experienced a condescending paternalism, reflected also in their cinematic portrayal and in popular literature and folklore. With the onset of the cold war, young Africans were encouraged to study in Russia, where they received a mixed reaction and, on account of occasional conflict with the authorities and Soviet cultural norms, became symbols of dissent against official Soviet culture. Later, in the perestroika period, Africa became a scapegoat for popular discontent amidst a worsening climate of racism.

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