“The Langston Hughes Review will project Langston Hughes’s vision in 21st century America,” Tony Bolden, editor of the newly re-established journal, explained to me in an email.
Langston Hughes, who died on May 22, 1967, is perhaps the most studied Black poet in history. He is the subject of not only a new NEA-funded documentary — produced by professor Randal Maurice Jelks and directed by Emmy Award-winning Madison Davis Lacy, and Keving Wilmott, an Academy winner and Cannes Film Festival Grand Prize recipient for BlacKkKlansman — but also the subject of “the first scholarly association named in honor of an African American writer.” The journal, published by the Langston Hughes Society, returns after an eight-year hiatus, and with it come reminders of the kaleidoscopic nature of Hughes’ work. LHR features essays inspired by a conference developed by acclaimed Hughes biographers Arnold Rampersad and Wallace D. Best. The conference, Remembering Langston Hughes: His Art, Life, and Legacy 50 Years Later, featured a keynote address by Elizabeth Alexander and readings by Tracy K. Smith and Kevin Young. Tony Bolden describes the challenge of investigating a writer as famous and rhizomatic as Hughes (“it was hard to agree on a common vision”) whose work interprets multiple aspects of the Black and American experience, and he points to the number of scholars — Maryemma Graham, John Edgar Tidwell, and members of the College Language Association, including past president Tara T. Green and current president Akiba Harper — involved in the journal’s relaunch.
The journal includes essays, some controversial, from academic pioneers and rising stars — Rampersad, Harper, Wallace D. Best, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Christopher C. De Santis, Carmaletta M. Williams, James T. Campbell, Josef Sorett, David E. Chinitz, Kelsey C. Moss). These scholars don’t always agree or come to a consensus, but maybe that’s the point. We’re compelled to read Hughes because, despite his fame and reputation, his political positions and spiritual and personal beliefs remain surprisingly elusive. Somehow Hughes’ writing flows and swells like a blues song, saturated with a dark humor — but it’s still damn hard to tie any one of his works to any single, one-dimensional meaning.
A writer as influential as Hughes demands attention, not only to understand aesthetic movements and their purposes, but also to contextualize individual artists, their histories, their complexities. Hughes’ words left firm prints during momentous times in Black culture: the Harlem Renaissance, the Negritude Movement (Rampersad describes Hughes’ appreciation for Aimé Césaire), Black post-war social realism (Harper’s essay mentions Hughes identifying with social realists Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Arna Bontemps), the Black Arts Movement (De Santis’s essay notes Amiri Baraka’s ambivalent views on Hughes), and perhaps even the outpouring of Black women’s fiction of the 1980s and 1990 —Alice Walker describes her love for Hughes and bringing him a bag of oranges during the final stages of his life.
Hughes’ more publicized friendships provide additional historical insights: his friendship with the poet Nicolás Guillén, for example, helps us understand conversations across the Diasporic about socio-economic conditions, while Hughes’ well known falling out with Zora Neale Hurston raises questions about Black artists and power, authorship, and artistic control. While the scholars in this journal mention aesthetic movements and allude to Hughes’ friendships with other famous artists, these are essays concerned with lesser known relationships (such as his friendship with Sartur Andrzejewski, and Hughes’ Auntie Reed) and how brief moments (a mother’s quick admonishment to her son, the idea of something being “Simple,” or even the word “soul”) can represent expansive ideas about life, death, and spirituality, and how art —especially music —can offer spiritual revelation.
Still, as LHR editor Tony Bolden points out, interrogating a writer as studied as Hughes can be problematic; Bolden explains that Hughes’ reputation may intimidate some scholars who, unaware of the multiple and varied facets of Hughes’ career, fear retreading familiar ground.
And this is what’s remarkable about LHR’s revival: it refuses to glorify Hughes as an ossified predecessor. Instead, the journal insists on clarifying Hughes’ ongoing relevance in the era of #blackgirlmagic and #blackboyjoy. LHR’s eleven essays offer varied ways of reading Hughes’ work: as a precursor to hip-hop culture (in De Santis’ “The Brilliant Rebel”); as offering a new perspective on spirituality (Rampersad, Best, Griffin, Sorett, and Moss); as exploring new perspectives on freedom of speech (Chinz’s essay describes how sealed transcripts that became available only in 2003 provide insight into Hughes’ McCarthy-era court testimony); as peering into the complexity of sexual expression (i.e., some scholars have speculated on Hughes’ sexuality and whether he was asexual, gay, bisexual, pansexual, or straight — and LHR essays by Best, Williams, and Moss suggest all of these possibilities) before the popularity of critically acclaimed artists like Frank Ocean or Janelle Monáe; or sustaining the resistance and critical analysis that informs today’s Black Lives Matter movement (in Griffin’s “Hughes and the Timeless Questions of Life and Death”). The issue soars with academic standouts while swiftly and keenly reminding us that conversations about spirituality, respectability, politics, and income inequality are continuous and help us understand art’s possibilities for suggesting social change.
LHR may be able to develop broad conversations about Hughes because, in general, scholars have more tools at their disposal. Harper, who teaches a semester-long seminar devoted to Langston Hughes and has authored Not So Simple: The “Simple” Stories by Langston Hughes, believes Hughes’ scholars are locating “new approaches to Hughes’s life and work.” Scholars, Harper explains, “always seem to be surprised at the diversity and longevity of Hughes’s canon.” She cites recent work such as Wallace Best’s Langston’s Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem (2017),which examined Hughes and religion, and Mary Louise Patterson and Evelyn Louise Crawford’s Letters From Langston (2016),which treated Hughes’ radicalism, as examples of the engaging research made possible by Hughes scholar Faith Berry as well as “new access to all sorts of manuscripts and correspondence.”
Bolden tells me that future issues of LHR will be devoted to Zora Neale Hurston, Amiri Baraka, and Ntozake Shange — writers who had some connection with Hughes —and LHR will feature Hughes scholarship from Chinese writers. Bolden has ambitious plans, even as he mourns what he sees as the loss of Black studies programs: Bolden suggests theactivism tied to working-class writers like poets Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez precipitated a demand for Black literary studies, but as today’s “young black literary artists” are being “developed in university settings, as opposed to predominantly black neighborhoods,” and the “styles and cultural politics shifted.”Bolden now sees “a de-emphasis on literature in Black studies programs and departments” and “a trend among graduate students” in all English departments “to concentrate in rhetoric and composition or creative writing,” which means less scholarship on Black literature.
Black literature and writers like Hughes may be taught less frequently, but I grew up cherishing Hughes, reciting “Variations of a Dream Deferred” in Judith Simon-Butler and Tyrone Butler’s Black-owned Mini Theatre. As a child I dreamed of dancing as wildly as a dream variation and feeling as beautiful as Susanna Jones wearing red. For those of us who have a visceral, emotional response to Hughes, this journal’s rigorous intellectual probing forces us to recognize Hughes’ writing as a complex, and unresolved, navigation of the multiple challenges we face in an unjust world.
LHR’s new issue offers delicious hints of what Hughes’ fiery words could mean during an era of fear and violent rhetoric, but also creativity, openness, and discovery. It places Hughes’ work in context. We can only savor more.
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Penn State University Press distributes the Langston Hughes Review for the Langston Hughes Society. You may subscribe to the journal here –> https://www.psupress.org/Journals/jnls_LHR.html