Langston Hughes, African American Literature, and the Religious Futures of Black Studies

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.

Download Full-text

Domestic Violence and Psychological Oppression in Alice Walker’s the Color Purple

International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering - 2 ◽

10.35940/ijrte.d1022.1284s419 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 8 (4S4) ◽

pp. 66-67

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

American Literature ◽

African American Literature ◽

Slave Narratives ◽

Alice Walker ◽

Langston Hughes ◽

Pulitzer Prize ◽

Epistolary Novel ◽

The Color Purple ◽

Color Purple

African-American literature is otherwise known as slave narratives. The popular African-American writers are Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Frederick Douglass, Alice Walker etc. The Color Purple is a well-known epistolary novel written by Alice Walker in 1983. The novel brought her a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1983. This is a novel about a young fourteen year old black girl. She is tortured physically, emotionally, sexually by her step father and her husband. Later on she develops an intimate relationship with Shug. It has changed her life topsy-turvy. The poor, ugly, innocent, oppressed, inferior woman tremendously changed as a woman of self confident, beautiful and proud human being.

Download Full-text

“Split by the Moonlight”: Beethoven and the Racial Sublime in African American Literature

American Literature ◽

10.1215/00029831-8780863 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 92 (4) ◽

pp. 623-652

Author(s):

Tamlyn Avery

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

African American ◽

American Literature ◽

Short Story ◽

African American Literature ◽

Langston Hughes ◽

Amiri Baraka ◽

Aesthetic Experiences ◽

The Sublime ◽

Definition Of

Abstract As Nathan Waddell has recently argued of the literary modernists whose aesthetic incorporation of the Beethovenian legend complicates the dominant view of modernism as an antitraditionalist enterprise, Ludwig van Beethoven’s music has in fact left a more significant and complicated mark on African American literature relating to the sublime properties of his musical aesthetic than has previously been recognized. As a point of departure, I apply Michael J. Shapiro’s definition of the racial sublime as a confrontation with the “still vast oppressive structure that imperils black lives” to the setting of twentieth-century African American literature, where Beethoven’s Romantic sublime often stands in for the racial sublime. This transference, I argue, is not an expression of the artist’s repressed instinctual conflict, the mere sublimation of their devotion to “white” culture and the cult of genius, as Amiri Baraka once suggested. Rather, Beethoven’s music formed a persistent and powerful political allegory of the racial sublime for many prominent twentieth-century authors in their literary works, where the sublime constitutes a sublimation of direct forms of power into a range of aesthetic experiences. This can be observed in the Beethovenian ekphrasis featured in prose works by James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison—four writers whose works have also been considered indebted to blues and jazz musical influences and who approach the racial sublime not through language but by appealing to music’s nonsignifying suggestiveness, in order to capture the intensities that radiate out of these encounters. As this article reveals, their allegorical uses for Beethoven are not unitary. The forcefield of the racial sublime is registered allegorically through the performative sublime of Sonata “Pathétique” in Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912); the sublime melancholy of the “Moonlight” Sonata in Hughes’s tragic short story “Home” (1934); the spiritual sublime of Beethoven’s piano concerti and the Ninth Symphony in Baldwin’s short story “Previous Condition” (1948); and the heroic sublime of the Fifth Symphony in Ellison’s bildungsroman Invisible Man (1952).

Download Full-text

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

Ethnic Studies Review ◽

10.1525/esr.2009.32.1.55 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 32 (1) ◽

pp. 55-76

Author(s):

Quan Manh Ha

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

African American ◽

American Literature ◽

African American Literature ◽

Black Experience ◽

Racial Issues ◽

Black Voices ◽

Late Twentieth ◽

One Year ◽

Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

Download Full-text