Chapter 10 - Coalitional Aesthetics

Summary

Langston Hughes spent a year in Carmel, California, beginning at the culmination of his round-the-world trip in 1933 and ending with his fleeing for fear of vigilante violence in the summer of 1934. During this time, he became increasingly involved in the Carmel John Reed Club (JRC), in part through his relationship with Ella Winter, with whom he wrote a play based on a local cotton strike, Blood on the Fields. He published his poem “Wait” (1934) in the West Coast JRC organ, The Partisan. This chapter argues that the work Hughes produced through his affiliation with the JRC displays a “coalitional aesthetics” that reflects the organizational mode of the clubs themselves. By addressing the specific labor concerns of the San Joaquin Valley alongside those of other regions, states, nations, and continents, it simultaneously focuses on both the molar and the molecular, ultimately enacting – at the level of form – coalitional networks of solidarity that cut across racial and geographic designations.