Montage of a Dream: The Art and Life of Langston HughesJohn Edgar Tidwell, Cheryl R. Ragar Over a forty six year career, Langston Hughes experimented with black folk expressive culture, creating an enduring body of extraordinary imaginative and critical writing. Riding the crest of African American creative energy from the Harlem Renaissance to the onset of Black Power, he commanded an artistic prowess that survives in the legacy he bequeathed to a younger generation of writers, including award winners Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, and Amiri Baraka. Montage of a Dream extends and deepens previous scholarship, multiplying the ways in which Hughes's diverse body of writing can be explored. The contributors, including such distinguished scholars as Steven Tracy, Trudier Harris, Juda Bennett, Lorenzo Thomas, and Christopher C. De Santis, carefully reexamine the significance of his work and life for their continuing relevance to American, African American, and diasporic literatures and cultures. Probing anew among Hughes's fiction, biographies, poetry, drama, essays, and other writings, the contributors assert fresh perspectives on the often overlooked "Luani of the Jungles" and Black Magic and offer insightful rereadings of such familiar pieces as "Cora Unashamed," "Slave on the Block," and Not without Laughter. In addition to analyzing specific works, the contributors astutely consider subjects either lightly explored by or unavailable to earlier scholars, including dance, queer studies, black masculinity, and children's literature. Some investigate Hughes's use of religious themes and his passion for the blues as the fabric of black art and life; others ponder more vexing questions such as Hughes's sexuality and his relationship with his mother, as revealed in the letters she sent him in the last decade of her life. Montage of a Dream richly captures the power of one man's art to imagine an America holding fast to its ideals while forging unity out of its cultural diversity. By showing that Langston Hughes continues to speak to the fundamentals of human nature, this comprehensive reconsideration invites a renewed appreciation of Hughes's work and encourages new readers to discover his enduring relevance as they seek to understand the world in which we all live. |
Contents
1 | |
32 | |
39 | |
55 | |
Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Question of Presence | 68 |
Sandys Emergent Masculinity | 86 |
The Letters from Carrie Hughes Clark to Langston Hughes 19281938 | 106 |
Reimagining the Africa of Heart of Darkness | 127 |
Langston Hughes and the African Diasporas Everyman | 181 |
Langston Hughes in Spain | 195 |
Interracialism as Queer Alliance in The Ways of White Folks | 209 |
Langston Hughes and the Childrens Literary Tradition | 237 |
Dance in Not without Laughter | 259 |
The Essayistic Vision of Langston Hughes | 284 |
The Case of Way Down South | 305 |
Bibliography | 319 |
Langston Hughess Red Poetics and the Practice of Disalienation | 135 |
The Paradox of Modernism in The Ways of White Folks | 147 |
The Empowerment of Displacement | 169 |
Notes on the Contributors | 335 |
Index | 341 |
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Popular passages
Page 138 - The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society — the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
Page 132 - No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it - this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity - like yours - the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.
Page 139 - The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
Page 150 - I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
Page 145 - The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure...
Page 88 - There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results.
Page 150 - And I have known the arms already, known them all — Arms that are braceleted and white and bare (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair...
Page 145 - Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception of the whole...