Toward An Afro-Modernist Future: Langston’s Hughes’s ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ

Abstract

In his jazz poems of the 1960s, Langston Hughes’s use of the page as a field allows for visual and verbal play, noise rather than silence, bringing the movement of performativity into and onto the former immobility of the black-and-white page. In ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ (1961), the first of 12 sections, “CULTURAL EXCHANGE,” enacts diasporic identity through the musical instructions printed down the right-hand side of the page, sections written in italics that play off the left-justified “poem” section written in all capital letters.