Chapter 28 - Langston Hughes

Summary

Hughes is widely regarded as the Harlem Renaissance’s most eminent Black queer literary figure, yet mapping this repute poses a weighty challenge. Rather than add yet another layer to the debate over Hughes’s sexual identity, this chapter surveys the queer content in his published writings with a view toward sketching the author’s role as a Black queer artist. This chapter takes the position that a foremost responsibility of the contemporary reader is to understand that to read Hughes’s work as queer art through a twenty-first-century sensibility would limit what Hughes’s queer literary art achieves. As with questions about his engagement with leftism, his position on Black uplift, and his temperament regarding the Harlem Renaissance itself, Hughes’s literary art demands to be read in its dense historical, cultural contexts, and in accordance with the author’s passionately private aesthetic.