While studies of Langston Hughes’s transnationality don’t often prioritize his involvement with the international Left, this essay takes up the question of how his global imaginary and his radicalism inform one other, examining specifically the fate of Hughes’s early radicalism—his early understanding of African American liberation struggles as aligned with anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements abroad—in his post-WWII writing. Against McCarthyism and the United States’ militant Cold War nationalism, Hughes develops a jazz poetics that salvages a margin of his ideal of revolutionary alliance—a poetics courting plausible yet indeterminable comparisons between the communality jazz enables across races and nationalities and a leftist international coalition. Hughes’s post-WWII deployment of jazz constitutes a “midcentury internationalism” that reckons with the diminishing possibilities of asserting solidarity among oppressed peoples. Hughes’s midcentury internationalism should be understood less as valorizing irreconcilable otherness and unpredictable encounters than as offering a complex imaginary that might maintain some sense of those possibilities.
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Research Article|
December 01 2024
After Revolutionary Alliance: Jazz and Langston Hughes’s Midcentury Internationalism
Wei Liu
Wei Liu is assistant professor of English at Peking University, Beijing. His interests include global modernisms, poetry and poetics, transnational and postcolonial studies, and world literature. He has published essays on modernist and postcolonial poetics and is currently working on a book about ideas of provincialism in twentieth-century Anglophone poetry.
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Twentieth-Century Literature (2024) 70 (4): 367–398.
Citation
Wei Liu; After Revolutionary Alliance: Jazz and Langston Hughes’s Midcentury Internationalism. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 December 2024; 70 (4): 367–398. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-11534720
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