Chapter 17 - Langston Hughes, Colonialism, and Decolonization

Summary

From his earliest writings, Langston Hughes expressed outrage at the predations of colonialism. These sentiments were reaffirmed in his early travels to Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, mostly to countries dominated by the European and US empires. Overt opposition to colonialism thus became fundamental to Hughes’s political and writerly praxis; moreover, it informed and motivated not only his representations of Africa but also his thinking about race, the Black diaspora, the United States, and the modern world. His recognition of colonialism as a system predicated on white supremacy helped him to see US racism and Jim Crow as local manifestations of that global system, which in turn motivated him to cultivate channels of solidarity and support with peoples around the world. Hughes used his writing to champion anticolonial resistance wherever he found it and, by highlighting its successes abroad, to inspire new oppositional movements at home in the United States.