Langston Hughes’s Radical Poetry and the “End of Race”

For a number of reasons, Langston Hughes's radical poetry, the bulk of which he wrote between 1932-1938, has received little scholarly attention and hasyet to make its way into many anthologies of American literature (with the notable exception of a few poems in the vanguard second and third editions of The Heath Anthology of American Literature). The origins of this benign and not-so-benign neglect lie in Hughes's own retrospective ambivalence toward his earlier radical activities and poetry. As early as 1940 he substantially repressed the memory of his involvement with the proletarian literary movement in his autobiography, The Big Sea. And we can surmise that the hostile recovery of this memory by none other than House on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in the 1950s did little to encourage Hughes to include his explicitly "red" poetry in his Selected Poems (1959). But Hughes's repression of his radical poetry in the 1940s and 1950s was only one symptom of a debilitating neurosis in American society: that all-too familiar Cold War fear of the radical "other" and its shadow, that even deeper fear of one's own "un-American" impulses. Of course, writers rarely exercise power over the public reception of their work, and Hughes was no exception. The repression--that is, exclusion--of proletarian literature from academic canons was in large part a New Critical achievement; 1930s radical poetry was disqualified as poetry, since it was not--nor ever aimed to be--self-referential. With a few exceptions, scholarship on Hughes's poetry tends to dismiss the works of this period because they don't measure up to aesthetic standards, or, as Arnold Rampersad has written, because they fail to express the "essential identity" (40) of the black American. After all, they embrace an internationalist perspective that is critical of the black nationalist or Pan-Africanist ideology attributed to his earlier Harlem Renaissance poems. The neglect of Hughes's radical poetry is unfortunate. He ought to be considered one of the first American poets effectively to challenge the post-World War I ethnic nationalism that to some extent informed the politics of the Harlem Renaissance, including some of his own early "blues" poetry; as well as that which fueled European fascism. More specifically, Hughes's internationalist poetry aims dialectically to preserve and transcend the categories of "race" and "nation" in order to overcome the fragmentation of global working class struggles. This effort may not have produced what some of us would deem formally or tonally "beautiful" works, but if Hughes chose to sacrifice artistry for politics, it was not because the two are mutually exclusive but because the blues aesthetic of his early poems embraced a form of nationalism he could no longer abide. Ironically, then, Hughes's work during the 1930s speaks directly to those who would dismiss it, challenging us to look more critically at current efforts to reclaim a black nationalist literary aesthetic, and prodding us, perhaps, to rethink the historical relationships between poetics and politics. 1 To understand Hughes's challenge we must first consider the construction, emergence, and ultimate hegemony of nationalism in the years following the first World War, as well as its effects on Hughes's early aesthetic theory. Many contemporary thinkers have convincingly shown that nationalism is a shifting concept, at times defined by the possession of a common language, territory, race, ethnicity, religion, psychology, and so forth. Benedict Anderson's conceptualization of nationality as an "imagined community" aptly underscores its fictive character. After 1880, nationalism became increasingly defined by an ethnic-linguistic criterion: if a number of people could claim a common ethnicity or "race" and language, then they could constitute a "nation." Another important feature of modern nationalism has been its hostility to its antithesis, or better, nemesis: internationalism. …