“I've Known Rivers”: Langston Hughes, Jacques Roumain, and the Emergence of Caribbean Modernism

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Jacques Roumain

Lyric Internationalism

2019 ◽  
pp. 143-178
Author(s):  
Sarah Ehlers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Jacques Roumain ◽  
Authorial Persona ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
African American Artists ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter considers Haitian communist poet Jacques Roumain and his reception in the United States. Analyzing the production, circulation, and reception of Roumain’s writings and his authorial persona, the chapter explores several connected variants of a communist internationalism that is imagined through the idea of “lyric,” or “lyricism,” and it demonstrates how such international imaginaries are tied to different conceptions of history. The chapter begins by sketching the import of Roumain as a figure for U.S. radicals. It then turns to Roumain’s friendship with Langston Hughes, showing how the exchange of poems between the two allows critics to move beyond straightforward historical accounts that show how radical African American artists and intellectuals referred to Haiti’s revolutionary past in their protests against Jim Crow policies, colonial occupations, and the rise of fascism in Europe. I argue that Roumain and Hughes harness and experiment with the unique temporality of the poetic lyric in order to present black radicalism as a formation unbounded by spatial and temporal borders. The final sections turn to the prose and poetry Roumain composed during his exile in the United States, using it to rearticulate ideas about the relationship of the poetic lyric to historical praxis.

The Question of Representation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Etherington
Keyword(s):  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Jacques Roumain ◽  
To Come ◽  
Concrete Representations ◽  
Inherent Tendency

Chapter 4 reconsiders the question of primitivist representation in light of the theoretical and historical arguments presented in Chapters 1 through 3. Discussing works by Emil Nolde, D. H. Lawrence, Langston Hughes, and Jacques Roumain, it argues that primitivism has an inherent tendency to transcend any fixed notion or representation of the primitive, and that it is the work itself that must produce the sought-for primitive experience. Thus we find a vacillation between concrete representations of “primitive” remnants and an abstracted, nonspecific ideal of the primitive to come.

La Traduction Anglaise de Gouverneurs de la rosée de Jacques Roumain par Langston Hughes et Mercer Cook

Babel ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 225-232
Author(s):  
Cyril Mokwenye
Keyword(s):  
Langston Hughes ◽  
The Novel ◽  
French Version ◽  
The World ◽  
Jacques Roumain ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
Made In

Jacques Roumain's novel, whose title, in its original French version, is Gouverneurs de la rosée, is a masterpiece that has enjoyed considerable popularity among French-speaking black peoples the world over. Its translation into English in 1971 as Masters of the Dew by Langston Hughes and Mercer Cook was most welcome as it has helped to launch and popularise the novel in the English-speaking world. A critical reading of the translated version, however, reveals a number of flaws that tend to detract from the otherwise tremendous effort of the translators. It is in this context that the essay takes a close look at the translation and points out areas in which the translation seems to have fallen short of expectations. Such identified flaws include wrong translations, inconsistencies, omissions and the erroneous use of italics as a translation device. An attempt is made in the essay to proffer suggestions to improve the quality of the wrongly translated parts of the work.

Left of Poetry

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Ehlers
Keyword(s):  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Muriel Rukeyser ◽  
Jacques Roumain ◽  
History Of ◽  
Depression Era

In this incisive study, Sarah Ehlers returns to the Depression-era United States in order to unsettle longstanding ideas about poetry and emerging approaches to poetics. By bringing to light a range of archival materials and theories about poetry that emerged on the 1930s left, Ehlers reimagines the historical formation of modern poetics. Offering new and challenging readings of prominent figures such as Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, and Jacques Roumain, and uncovering the contributions of lesser-known writers such as Genevieve Taggard and Martha Millet, Ehlers illuminates an aesthetically and geographically diverse matrix of schools and movements. Resisting the dismissal of thirties left writing as mere propaganda, the book reveals how communist-affiliated poets experimented with poetic modes—such as lyric and documentary—and genres, including songs, ballads, and nursery rhymes, in ways that challenged existing frameworks for understanding the relationships among poetic form, political commitment, and historical transformation. As Ehlers shows, Depression left movements and their international connections are crucial for understanding both the history of modern poetry and the role of poetic thought in conceptualizing historical change.

Hemispheric Solidarities

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harris Feinsod
Keyword(s):  
Public Good ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Pablo Neruda ◽  
Racial Democracy ◽  
Good Neighbor

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.

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