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14 results

  • Chapter 18 - Langston Hughes and Cultural Diplomacy

  • from Part II - The Global Langston Hughes
  • Edited by Vera M. Kutzinski, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, Anthony Reed, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
  • Book:
    Langston Hughes in Context
    Published online:
    10 November 2022
    Print publication:
    24 November 2022, pp 192-202

  • Summary

    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.

  • Introduction

  • Edited by Harilaos Stecopoulos
  • Book:
    A History of the Literature of the U.S. South
    Published online:
    29 April 2021
    Print publication:
    20 May 2021, pp 1-18

  • Summary

    This introduction achieves three goals. First, the essay offers readers a brief account of the differences between the old southern studies andNew Southern Studies, with a particular focus on race. Second, the piece examines how the New Southern Studies requires a different type of literary historical narrative, one which emphasizes pluralism and multiplicity more than homogeneity and cohesion.Third, it provides an overview of the twenty-four essays included in the volume.

A History of the Literature of the U.S. South
  • Volume 1
  • Edited by Harilaos Stecopoulos
  • Published online:
    29 April 2021
    Print publication:
    20 May 2021
  • A History of the Literature of the U.S. South provides scholars with a dynamic and heterogeneous examination of southern writing from John Smith to Natasha Trethewey. Eschewing a master narrative limited to predictable authors and titles, the anthology adopts a variegated approach that emphasizes the cultural and political tensions crucial to the making of this regional literature. Certain chapters focus on major white writers (e.g., Thomas Jefferson, William Faulkner, the Agrarians, Cormac McCarthy), but a substantial portion of the work foregrounds the achievements of African American writers like Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sarah Wright to address the multiracial and transnational dimensions of this literary formation. Theoretically informed and historically aware, the volume's contributors collectively demonstrate how southern literature constitutes an aesthetic, cultural and political field that richly repays examination from a variety of critical perspectives.

  • Locating the Global South: Faulkner and Wright in Postwar Asia

  • Harilaos Stecopoulos
  • Journal:
    Prospects / Volume 28 / October 2004
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    30 July 2009, pp. 465-496
    Print publication:
    October 2004

  • Of all the disturbing scenes to appear in The Ugly American (1958), William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick's fictional account of U.S. foreign policy in Asia, none is more unnerving than the depiction of two French Foreign Legionnaires — one African American, one Vietnamese — returning from an ill-fated attempt to scout the Communist Vietnamese position:

    Davis was leading Apache. From fifty yards they could see that there was a gout of blood on Davis's cheek. At twenty-five yards they could see the mangled remains of his left eye, hanging in a cluster of tiny glistening cords and muscles…. “They caught us, Major,” Davis said. “There has to be a first time for everything and this time they caught us.” …Davis reached over and pulled Apache's hand away from his throat. Squarely in the center of his throat there was a twisted hole. Far back in the hole the muscles and cords of his neck glistened. (130–31)

    The anti-Communist bonding of the African-American Davis and the Vietnamese “Apache” — the only such interracial union depicted in The Ugly American — ends with the physical mutilation and symbolic castration of each man, one denuded of his voice, the other of his eye. In part, the horrific results of Apache and Davis's capture reveal the Communists' brutal refusal to allow locals to ally themselves with foreigners of any color. As Davis puts it, “They left my right eye so that we could find our way back and show ourselves as a lesson to others” (131).