Langston Hughes 19021967

1
Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

• Born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri
• Grew up mainly in Lawrence, Kansas
• Lived in Illinois, Ohio, and Mexico
• A family of militant abolitionists

Pastel drawing of Hughesby Winold Reiss
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Hughess Works

• A novel fusion of jazz and blues with traditional
  verse in The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes
  to the Jew (1927)
• First novel Not Without Laughter (1930)
• A year (1932-1933) in the Soviet Union his most
  radical verse
• A year in Carmel, California a collection of
  short stories, The Ways of White Folks (1934)

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Hughes Works

• Plays Mulatto (1935), Little Ham (1936), Emperor
  of Haiti (1936).
• In 1937 he spent several months in Europe,
  including a long stay in besieged Madrid
• In 1938 founded the Harlem Suitcase Theater,
  which staged his agitprop drama Don't You Want to
  Be Free?, ? vigorous blend of black nationalism,
  the blues, and socialist exhortation

4
Hughes Works

• A volume of autobiography, The Big Sea (1940),
  written in an episodic, lightly comic manner,
  made virtually no mention of his leftist
  sympathies
• A book of verse Shakespeare in Harlem (1942) he
  once again sang the blues
• On the other hand, this collection, as well as
  another, his Jim Crows Last Stand (1943),
  strongly attacked racial segregation

5
Hughes Works

• After the WWII, two books of verse, Fields of
  Wonder (1947) and One-Way Ticket (1949), added
  little to his fame
• Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) - new ground
  with verse accented by the discordant nature of
  the new bebop jazz that reflected a growing
  desperation in the black urban communities of the
  North

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"The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain"(1926)

• One of the most promising of the young Negro
  poets said to me once, "I want to be a poet--not
  a Negro poet," meaning, I believe, "I want to
  write like a white poet" meaning subconsciously,
  "I would like to be a white poet" meaning behind
  that, "I would like to be white." And I was sorry
  the young man said that, for no great poet has
  ever been afraid of being himself.

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"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"(1926)

• And I doubted then that, with his desire to run
  away spiritually from his race, this boy would
  ever be a great poet. But this is the mountain
  standing in the way of any true Negro art in
  America--this urge within the race toward
  whiteness, the desire to pour racial
  individuality into the mold of American
  standardization, and to be as little Negro and as
  much American as possible.

8
Harlem Renaissance Writing

• Huston A. Baker a complete expressive modernity
  was achieved only when Harlem Renaissance gave
  way to what might be called renaissancism
• By this term he suggests a spirit of
  nationalistic engagement that prompts the
  black artists awareness that his or her only
  possible foundation for authentic and modern
  expressivity resides in a discursive field marked
  by formal masterly and sounding deformation

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Harlem Renaissance Writing

• The blending, I want to suggest, of class and
  mass poetic mastery discovered as a function of
  deformative folk sound constitutes the essence
  of black discursive modernism. Huston A. Baker

William H. Johnson, Swing Low Sweet
ChariotNational Museum of American Art
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African American Playwrights

• Plays concerned with the lives and problems of
  the community, which was part of the Harlem
  Renaissance
• Black theatre included
• - The Harlem Experimental Theatre
• - The Krigwa Players
• - The Howard Players from the Howard University,
  Washington, DC
• - The various Negro Units of the Federal Theatre
  Project

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Philosophical Trends

• Du Bois favoured propaganda plays that revealed
  the racial prejudice and violence encountered by
  black Americans
• A. Locke promoted folk drama that focused on
  authentic black themes and characters but without
  emphasizing racial oppression

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African American Playwrights

• The most prolific playwrights
• Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston Mule Bone
• Georgia Douglas Johnson Blue Blood, Plumes, A
  Sunday Morning in the South
• Wrote both types of drama often combining strands
  of each type in a single work

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African American Plays

• Plays with historical themes and subjects
• African heritage
• Slavery
• Heroic ancestors
• Served to inform audiences about the traditions
  of black culture and to reinforce racial pride.