Book contents
- African American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940
- African American Literature in Transition
- African American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Preface
- Chronology, 1930–1940
- Introduction
- Part I Productive Precarity and Literary Realism
- Part II New Deal, New Methodologies
- Part III Cultivating (New) Black Readers
- Part IV International, Black, and Radical Visions
- Chapter 9 Democracy Unfinished: African Americans Writing “Africa”
- Chapter 10 Langston Hughes and the 1930s: From Harlem to the USSR
- Chapter 11 Black Cultural (Inter)nationalism
- Index
- References
Chapter 10 - Langston Hughes and the 1930s: From Harlem to the USSR
from Part IV - International, Black, and Radical Visions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2022
- African American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940
- African American Literature in Transition
- African American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Preface
- Chronology, 1930–1940
- Introduction
- Part I Productive Precarity and Literary Realism
- Part II New Deal, New Methodologies
- Part III Cultivating (New) Black Readers
- Part IV International, Black, and Radical Visions
- Chapter 9 Democracy Unfinished: African Americans Writing “Africa”
- Chapter 10 Langston Hughes and the 1930s: From Harlem to the USSR
- Chapter 11 Black Cultural (Inter)nationalism
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter argues that the articles, poems, interviews, essays, and memoirs that emerged from Hughes’s eighteen months in the USSR reflect a distinct literary-mobility paradigm through which he critiques American race, gender, politics, justice, capitalism, and power relationships, through the rhetorical device of travel writing. Traveling to the USSR in 1932 with a group of African American writers, actors, and activists who had been invited to make a film about race in America, Hughes was eager to participate in the socialist aesthetic agenda. Despite his initial enthusiasm, Hughes soon became disillusioned with the Soviet system.
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- Information
- African American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940 , pp. 296 - 320Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022