Chapter 22 - Langston Hughes’s Short Fiction in 1930s Korea

Summary

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.