This chapter explores Langston Hughes’s travels to Spain as a political correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American during the Spanish Civil War in 1937. His journalism, featuring interviews with the Black volunteers in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, was just one genre in a significant body of literary production that he completed in Spain. His time in Spain was a culmination of political activities related to labor, antiracist, anticolonial, and antifascist causes. The chapter examines how literary collaborations with the Spanish avant-garde group the Generation of 1927, and specifically his relationships with Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León, nurtured his production of original poetry, theater, and translations of Federico García Lorca’s Romancero gitano and Bodas de sangre. In Spain, Hughes experimented with multilingualism and intertextual adaptation across different mediums in order to show antifascist solidarity across linguistic, national, and racial boundaries.

The poetry of Langston Hughes has traveled extensively into Arabic through translation, both in formal publications and on the internet. This chapter explores a range of these translations, in Arab American contexts in the United States and within the Arab world, focusing in particular on one poem, “Harlem [2].” It examines the use of Hughes as a symbol of Black America, and representative of Black poetry and arts, as well as some of the intricacies of English-Arabic translation, including a focus on content and meaning over form and stylistics in rendering his work in Arabic.

Although critics have tended to regard Hughes’s 1930s short fiction as less politically engaged than his poetry and drama of the same period, Hughes’s Great Depression–period short stories in fact engage in a form of literary radical activism. The stories expose racism as a form of nationalism that articulates interwar US imperialism and domestic fascism. With their understated and ironic tone, Hughes’s short stories are as stylistically effective as any of the most admired Harlem Renaissance–period short stories and as compelling as Black short fiction after the renaissance. Hughes’s short fiction is aesthetically forceful if one accepts the notion that Black fiction of the Great Depression through the civil rights period does not have to emulate modernist, canonical, universalist fiction, art that is allegedly free of ideological content. This chapter examines such stories as “Cora Unashamed” and “The Blues I’m Playing” for both their aesthetic and political distinction.

Although Langston Hughes remains one of our most widely published authors, few attempts have been made to chart the circulation of his works across dozens of anthologies during the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Yet an examination of 180 collections published over more than ninety-five years shows how editors collectively made Hughes a representative and at the same time exceptional black writer. The authors of this chapter use data management and analyses to understand a variety of patterns associated with the extensive processes of anthologizing Langston Hughes from 1923 through 2020. Their project reveals how Hughes reprints make him a statistical outlier, not merely widely published, and further, their research indicates the importance of incorporating quantitative approaches into the study of African American publishing history.

This chapter examines Langston Hughes’s long-neglected service as a literary ambassador. Focusing on Hughes’s 1965 trip to France and his 1966 visit to Senegal, the chapter demonstrates that the eminent poet used Cold War cultural diplomacy to promote Black internationalist connection and, more surprisingly, to express his political and aesthetic disagreements with an incipient Black Arts Movement.

Examining Hughes’s interest in Ebony magazine as a context informing his approach to writing at mid-century, this chapter explores the intersections aesthetically and politically between the landscape of popular journalism and Hughes’s work for the young. In Famous American Negroes (1954) and Famous Negro Music Makers (1955), Hughes combines photography and narrative to demonstrate the economic, political, and creative accomplishments of Black Americans. Hughes’s approach to the designation of “famous” as a marker of Black accomplishment corresponds to the method of Ebony in deploying public recognition and singularity as signs of civil rights progress, a strategic approach during the Cold War, during which straightforward assertions of dissatisfaction with American ideals could appear dangerous. By focusing on notoriety, Hughes picks up on the mode dominant in Ebony magazine but elaborates and complicates its tendencies. In the books’ depiction of music, Hughes articulates a resistant approach to the singularity of celebrity biography.

A decade after the publication of Langston Hughes’s Simple Speaks His Mind (1950) and less than three months before the construction of the Berlin Wall, the German translation, Simple spricht sich aus (1960), was published by Auf-Bau Verlag in the German Democratic Republic. The complex relations between two languages and cultures were further complicated by the radical ideological differences in divided postwar Germany. Almost fifty years after German reunification and the election of the first African American president of the United States, the Austrian Milena Verlag released a new German translation of Simple (2009). Viewing multiple forms of translation, this chapter explores how Hughes’s text meant very different things at different points in Simple’s cultural history. Issues of class and race attained varied interpretations in the different translations studied here, addressing diverse issues over time and place, both separating and uniting content and language.

This chapter examines the Italian translation of Langston Hughes’s poetry of the late 1940s and 1950s against the grain of Hughes’s life experience in Italy in the summer of 1924, as evidenced in The Big Sea and the letters written during this time. It argues that the work of translation reflects Italy’s fascist racial thinking, which makes the poet’s Blackness either obscurely picturesque or altogether invisible. Hughes’s own reading of Italy, in turn, makes Blackness historically visible by uncovering the rhetorical illusion that plagued both the conventional view of African American poetic expression as folkloric and the conventional view Italy as idyllic.

This chapter examines Korean translations of Langston Hughes’s short fiction in the 1930s to trace Hughes’s inspiration for the willful violation of social order. In the mid-1930s when Korea was under Japanese rule (1910–45), Jong-su Yi introduced Hughes’s leftist vision to a Korean audience by translating “Mother and Child” and “Cora Unashamed.” The medium of the magazine facilitated this global dissemination of Hughes. The act of translating pieces from contemporaneous non-Japanese-language periodicals was Korean intellectuals’ deliberate means to keep abreast of proletarian developments in other countries while redressing Korea’s reliance on the colonizer’s cultural resources. By focusing on Hughes’s depictions of African American workers and their interracial relationships, Yi encouraged Korean readers to imagine living otherwise when adhering to the system of oppression and exploitation was the normative condition. Yi’s subversive practice of translation expands Hughes’s radicalism as manifested in racial and sexual transgression.

Langston Hughes’s association with Chicago as a nexus for modernism was clearly marked in 1926, when he published four poems in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, a leading journal for avant-garde poetry in the English-speaking world. This analysis considers how geocultural contexts in Chicago figured in the development of Hughes’s engagements with modernism. Examining Hughes’s jazz and blues poetry of the 1920s in light of his response to formal innovations by Chicago Renaissance poets such as Carl Sandburg as well as “high” modernists such as T. S. Eliot, I also explore how his critical engagement with Ezra Pound’s imagist poetics was shaped by the prior examples of Sandburg and Jean Toomer, and conclude with a discussion of how Hughes’s literary collaboration with Chicago luminaries such as Richard Wright and his mentorship of Gwendolyn Brooks played an important role in the creative flowering of the Black Chicago Renaissance.

This chapter discusses the dynamics between Black artists and white patrons during the Harlem Renaissance told through the turbulent relationship between Langston Hughes and his literary “Godmother,” Charlotte Osgood Mason. The chapter begins with a discussion of Hughes’s groundbreaking 1926 essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” and explores the complex connection between the independent spirit of the sentiments expressed in that essay to the deeper acknowledgment of the perennial pressures exerted by white literary gatekeepers and Black artists that dominate some of his later work, particularly his 1934 short story collection, The Ways of White Folks.

This chapter argues that Langston Hughes’s 1930s red poetry posits a proletarian-internationalist notion of authenticity, one that attempts to close the cognitive gap between lived reality, on the one hand, and the latter’s spatial, temporal, and structural determinations, on the other. The chapter maintains that two dominant poetics articulate this authenticity, namely, the Communist Sublime and the Antifascist Grotesque. Although each poetics corresponds to a specific set of concerns of the contemporaneous Communist-led Left, both endeavor to unite a fragmented global proletariat using various thematic and formal strategies. Viewed as heuristics allowing us to link Hughes’s radical poetry to the context of Great Depression–era Communism, the Communist Sublime and the Antifascist Grotesque refute the misconception that authenticity was an exclusive feature of the poet’s Black-vernacular work. They also unveil the hopes and fears that defined Hughes’s literary imagination as the possibility of proletarian revolution gave way to war and Fascism.

From his emergence during the Harlem Renaissance, James Mercer Langston Hughes (1902–67) embodied the contradictions and promise of black life and art in the twentieth century. Born in Joplin, Missouri, Hughes established himself as the “Poet Laureate of the Negro Race” with The Weary Blues (1926). But “the Negro Race” was never bound by one nation, and geographies in Hughes’s work are always sites of crossing, migration, immigration, and emigration. His reception bears this out. Early on, Hughes – arguably the most influential writer among his Harlem Renaissance peers – established an enduring reputation in the United States and abroad through his poetry, prose, drama, and their translations. By the time he graduated from Lincoln University in 1929, he had already published a second volume of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), and he had visited West Africa, France, and Italy. Extended trips to Haiti, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Spain followed, and with them versions of his poems in many languages.

The chapter provides an overview of Langston Hughes’s deep intellectual engagement with Mexico throughout his adult life. The writer spent extended times in the country at different points in his life. During these stays, he actively engaged with Mexican nature and culture, with the artistic and intellectual vanguard, as well as with the common people he encountered. Exploring the cities he lived in, as well as their surrounding nature, he expressed his observations and experiences of Mexican places and people in a series of poems, stories, essays, and his two volumes of autobiography. In turn, Hughes’s commitment to Mexico as well as to communities of color throughout the Americas won him high esteem across Latin America. Many of his poems appeared in Spanish translation in Mexican and other Latin American literary journals since the 1920s, thus further disseminating his work and vision across the region. The chapter discusses this rich body of literary travels and translations against the backdrop of their cultural historical contexts to explore Hughes’s vision of Mexico as well as his place in Mexican cultural reception.

In the 1930 novel Not without Laughter, Langston Hughes represents Black life in the Midwest through the experiences of Sandy Rodgers and his family in small-town Stanton, Kansas (a stand-in for Hughes’s childhood home of Lawrence, Kansas). Much of the criticism on Not without Laughter focuses on the influences of Sandy’s grandmother and aunts, but this chapter centers his father, Jimboy. While he rarely instructs Sandy on how to be a man, Jimboy models a Black blues masculinity that draws together multiple aspects of early twentieth-century American culture. By reading Jimboy within the novel’s Midwestern cultural and historical context, this chapter foregrounds him as a consequential figure within both the novel and Sandy’s life. Jimboy’s demeanor, musicality, and mobility suggest how Sandy might learn to cope with life in the modern Midwest – notably, however, in ways that do not align with the conventionally respectable aspirations of his female relatives.