Abstract
Writing in the prominent African American newspaper The Chicago Defender in 1949, Langston Hughes recalled meeting Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India. Hughes remembered Nehru as “a gentle, soft-spoken, highly intellectual man, about my own complexion.” By noting the color of Nehru’s skin, was Hughes gesturing toward colored solidarity? In prose and poetry, Hughes contributed much to the transnational dissemination of colored cosmopolitanism. Colored unity was never, however, his primary focus. Hughes authored many poems that envision solidarities between oppressed people throughout the world. Several juxtapose Indian and African American struggles. These poems rarely mention color. Hughes linked disparate movements primarily via expansive notions of oppression and freedom. Unlike Dover’s writings, Hughes’s most transnational poems do not imagine a free colored world but a world free from the burden of color.2
An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he must choose.
—Langston Hughes1
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Notes
W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” The Crisis 32 (October 1926): 290–297.
David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight For Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: H. Holt, 2000), 179.
Arnold Rampersad, “Hughes’s Fine Clothes to the Jew,” in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds., Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (New York: Amistad Press, 1993), 54.
Langston Hughes, “Foreword,” in Christopher C. De Santis, ed., The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Volume 9, Essays on Art, Race, Politics and World Affairs (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 511–512.
Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (New York: Random House, 2003).
Arnold Rampersad, “The Origins of Poetry in Langston Hughes,” in Harold Bloom, ed., Langston Hughes: Modern Critical Views (New York and Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1989), and George E. Kent, “Hughes and the Afro-American Folk and Cultural Tradition,” in Bloom, Langston Hughes: Modern Critical Views, 19 and 185–186, italics in original.
Pablo Neruda, Memoirs, Hardie St. Martin, trans. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1971), 127–130.
On Cunard, see Susan Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
Cedric Dover, “May Days in Spain,” in Nancy Cunard, ed., Les Poétes du Monde défendant la Peuple Espagnol (Paris, 1937), 4; Cedric Dover to Langston Hughes, 10.7.37, Folder 154, Box 7, Langston Hughes papers.
Langston Hughes, “Negroes in Spain,” The Volunteer for Liberty (September 13, 1937) in Good Morning, Revolution, 104; William R. Scott, The Sons of Sheba’s Race: African-Americans and the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935–1941 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).
See Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: Race and the Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), chapter 6 and the letters between Nehru and Eslanda Goode Robeson in Volume 88, Jawaharlal Nehru Papers, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.
Langston Hughes, “Ghandi Is Fasting,” in Arnold Rampersad, ed., David Roessel, assoc. ed., The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Knopf, Distributed by Random House, 1994), 578; R. Lal Singh to Hughes, October 7, 1942, October 29, 1942, and February 18, 1943, Folder 3727, Box 225, Langston Hughes Papers (Series I–IV), JWJ MSS 26, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University;
Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, America: The Land of Superlatives (Bombay: Phoenix Publications, 1946), 209.
See Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).
“Nazi Plan for Negroes Copies Southern U.S.A.,” The Crisis 48 (March 1941): 71. Roi Ottley, New World A-Coming: Inside Black America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 306–307.
Also see Harvard Sitkoff, “Racial Militancy and Interracial Violence in the Second World War,” The Journal of American History 58, no. 3 (December 1971): 661–681.
Langston Hughes “Too Much of Race,” The Volunteer for Liberty (August 23, 1937),
in Faith Berry, ed., Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings (New York: L. Hill, 1973), 97–99.
Sugata Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle Against Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011) and A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), chapter 5;
Leonard A. Gordon, Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990);
Reginald Kerney, African American Views of the Japanese: Solidarity or Sedition? (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998);
Gerald Horne, Race War: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2004);
Ernest Allen, Jr., “Waiting for Tojo: The Pro-Japan Vigil of Black Missourians, 1932–1943,” Gateway Heritage (Fall 1994): 16–32; Marc Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000);
John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986);
Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978): especially, 3–11 and 726–730.
Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 243 and 165.
Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 10–11, 14, 141;
Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1940), 11.
Langston Hughes, Introduction to Montage of a Dream Deferred in Arnold Rampersad, ed., The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Knopf, 1994), 387; David Hye Shalom Arekre to Langston Hughes, June 16, 1948 and Hughes to Arekre, October 6, 1948, in Folder 3727, Box 225, Langston Hughes Papers (Series I–IV), JWJ MSS 26, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; David Hye Shalom Arekre to Langston Hughes, June 16, 1948 and Hughes to Arekre, October 6, 1948, in Folder 3727, Box 225, Langston Hughes Papers (Series I–IV), JWJ MSS 26, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University;
K. A. Abbas, An Indian Looks at America (Bombay: Thacker, 1943); Chattopadhyaya, America, 187; Hughes to T. K. Mahadevan, December 28, 1966, Folder 3727, Box 225, Langston Hughes Papers (Series I–IV), JWJ MSS 26, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Folder 1059, Hughes Papers.
Cedric Dover, Brown Phoenix (London: College Press, 1950); Cedric Dover, “The Black Knight,” Phylon 15, no. 1 (1st Quarter, 1954) and “The Black Knight: Part II,” Phylon 15, no. 2 (2nd Quarter, 1954).
Ibid. and Langston Hughes, “Freedom’s Plow,” in Arnold Rampersad, ed., David Roessel, assoc. ed., The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Knopf, Distributed by Random House, 1994), 263; “The Task of the Negro Writer as Artist,” Negro Digest 14 (April 1965): 65, 75 in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Volume 9, 425.
James Baldwin, review of Langston Hughes, Selected Poems, The New York Times Book Review (March 29, 1959), in Gates and Appiah, Langston Hughes, 38.
Cedric Dover, “Notes on Coloured Writing,” Phylon 8, no. 3 (3rd Quarter, 1947): 213.
Kenneth W. Warren, What Was African American Literature? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); Dover, Cimmerii.
Rochelle Gibson, “This Week’s Personality,” Saturday Review 35 (April 19, 1952): 63 quoted in Maryemma Graham, “The Practice of a Social Art,” in Gates and Appiah, Langston Hughes, 214;
Langston Hughes, “My Adventures as a Social Poet,” Phylon 8, no. 3 (1947): 205–212.
Langston Hughes, “Writers, Words and the World,” in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Volume 9, Essays on Art, Race, Politics and World Affairs, Christopher C. De Santis, ed. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 198–199.
Cedric Dover, “American Negro Art,” The American Review 1, no. 3 (Spring 1961): 9, Aaron Douglas Collection, Fisk University Special Collections.
Cedric Dover, Feathers in the Arrow: An Approach for Coloured Writers and Readers (Bombay: Padma Publications, 1947), 17. Alain Locke, “Self-Criticism: The Third Dimension in Culture,” Phylon 11, no. 4 (1950);
Cedric Dover, ed., “Special Symposium on the American Negro,” United Asia 5, no. 3 (June 1953): 198.
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© 2014 Nico Slate
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Slate, N. (2014). Langston Hughes and Race as Propaganda. In: The Prism of Race. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137484116_4
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