Langston Hughes in Context

This volume assembles exciting new scholarship canvassing the entire geographic and historical range of Langston Hughes's storied career.

Vera M. Kutzinski (Edited by), Anthony Reed (Edited by)

9781316512128, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 November 2022

400 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.6 cm, 0.67 kg

Langston Hughes was among the most influential African American writers of the twentieth century. He inspired and challenged readers from Harlem to the Caribbean, Europe, South America, Asia, the African continent, and beyond. To study Langston Hughes is to develop a new sense of the twentieth century. He was more than a man of his times; emerging as a key member of the Harlem Renaissance, his poems, plays, journalism, translations, and prose fiction documented and shaped the world around him. The twenty-nine essays in this volume engage with his at times conflicting investments in populist and modernist literature, his investments in freedom in and beyond the US, and the many genres through which he wrote. Langston Hughes in Context considers the places and experiences that shaped him, the social and cultural contexts in which he wrote, thought and travelled, and the international networks that forged and secured his life and reputation.

Introduction: Langston Hughes in context Vera M. Kutzinski and Anthony Reed
Part I. Singing America: Different Voices and Genres: 1. Hughes, Chicago, and modernism Anita Patterson
2. Jazz performance and Hughes's embodied modernism Michael Borshuk
3. His way with white folks: Hughes and literary patronage Emily Bernard
4. Distancing love in selected letters of Langston Hughes and Carrie Hughes Carmaletta Williams and John Edgar Tidwell
5. Hughes's 1930s short fiction Gary Edward Holcomb
6. Hughes and simple: across form and space to a political consciousness Sandhya Shukla
7. Hughes's famous books, Ebony magazine, and the politics of civil rights in biographies for the young Katharine Capshaw
8. Back-porch blues, black masculinity, and the rural Midwest Andy Oler
9. From the sublime to the grotesque: red Langston reconsidered Juan Rodríguez Barrera
10. Coalitional aesthetics: Hughes and the John Reed clubs Matthew Beeber
11. Hughes's translingual poetics and pedagogy Keith Michael Green
Part II. The Global Hughes: Travel and Translation: 12. Hughes and the Haitian Revolution Philip Kaisary
13. Taking Louise Bennett seriously: Hughes, gender, and transnational friendship Bernie Lombardi
14. Hughes in Mexico Astrid Haas
15. Hughes in Spain Evelyn Scaramella
16. Hughes in Cuba and South America Vera M. Kutzinski
17. Hughes, colonialism, and decolonization Shane Graham
18. Hughes as cold-war diplomat Harilaos Stecopoulos
19. Hughes in the Soviet Union Kate A. Baldwin
20. Hughes in Italy Cristina Lombardi-Diop
21. Hughes and the Shanghai jazz scene Selina Lai-Henderson
22. Hughes's short fiction in 1930s Korea Jang Wook Huh
Part III. Afterlives: Home and Abroad: 23. Anthologizing the writings of Langston Hughes, 1925– 2020 Howard Rambsy II and Kenton Rambsy
24. Hughes and the Black Arts Movement James Smethurst
25. Hughes's simple story cycles in German translation Dorothea Fischer-Hornung
26. Dreams deferred in Arabic: translating Hughes from the USA to Egypt Michelle Hartman
27. A raisin in the (fallen) sun: a nuclear reading of The Black Pacific Etsuko Taketani
28. Langston Hughes, queer Harlem renaissance author Gary Edward Holcomb
29. Reading Scottsboro, Limited in the era of Black Lives Matter. Anthony Reed.

Subject Areas: Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]