Revolution and Langston Hughes’s Central Asian Writings
- Issue:
- УДК / UDK: 82(091)
- DOI:
10.22455/2541-7894-2017-3-90-105
- Abstract:
Langston Hughes was escaping racial terrorism in the United States in hopes of finding racial equality in Russia and beyond. This desire may have found its fullest expression in the essays he wrote while in Russia, both in a Soviet-funded pamphlet called A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia and in the handful of essays he published upon his return to the United States. In these essays he came to draw the parallel between the gender segregation of the harem of Soviet Central Asia and the color line in the United States. Hughes was also fascinated by the artistic innovations of the Soviet avant-garde; inspired by the Soviet project — as an artistic and political endeavor — in the 1930s. He sought to use the lessons of linking politics and aesthetics to explore the revolutionary potential of Comintern notions for his own purposes. Through a close reading of Hughes’s essay, In an Emir’s Harem, I consider the situated aesthetics of Hughes’s revolutionary project when he was in Soviet Central Asia, and immediately beyond it. The promise of a Soviet-inspired internationalism lay in its abilities to disrupt conventional national boundaries, foment ethnic particularism, and to establish cross-national alliances. For Hughes, the intervention was at the level of subject formation: if you could put a colored people at the forefront of a revolutionary movement, you could perhaps foment a non-Hegelian account of historical development.
- Keywords: Langston Hughes; African American authors; Soviet-Black relationships; race in the Soviet Union; Soviet Central Asia; race and gender in the U.S.; politics, aesthetics and ethnicity; cultures of circulation.
- References:
Cooke, Catherine. Russian Avant-Garde: Theories of Art, Architecture, and the City. London: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
Frank, Gerold. “Painter Sees Revival for Art in America.” New York Journal and American (Jan. 1, 1939).
Gough, Maria. The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005.
Hirsch, Francine. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Kmowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005
Hughes, Langston; Berry, Faith, ed. Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Writings of Langston Hughes. New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1992.
Hughes, Langston. “In an Emir’s Harem.” Woman’s Home Companion 12 (September 1934): 91–92. Ill. by Andre Durenceau;
Hughes, Langston. “The Soviet Union and Health.”(Chicago Defender July 20, 1946).
Kernan, Ryan. “The Coup of Langston Hughes’s Picasso Period: Excavating Mayakovsky in Langston Hughes’s Verse.” Comparative Literature 66:2 (2014): 227–46.
Kernan, Ryan. Lost and Found in Black Translation: Langston Hughes’s Translations of French and Spanish Poetry, his Hispanic and Francophone Translators, and the Fashioning of Radical Black Subjectivities” Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 2007.
Kiaer, Christina. Imagine No Possessions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Lee, Steven S. The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution. New York:Columbia University Press, 2015.
Mukherji, Ani. The Exilic Imagination. Ph.D. diss. Brown University, 2010.
Peterson, Dale. Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Shklovsky, Viktor. Art as Technique. Online at https://paradise.caltech.edu/ist4/lectures/Viktor_Sklovski-Art-as_Technique.pdf (last accessed February 12, 2016).
Slezkine, Yuri. “The USSR as Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Pluralism.” Slavic Review 53:2 (1994), 414–52.
Streeby, Shelley. Radical Sensations: World Movements, Violence, and Visual Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.
Suny, Ronald. The Revenge of the Past Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993.
