Chapter 11 - Langston Hughes’s Translingual Poetics and Pedagogy

Summary

This chapter explores Hughes’s investments in and invocation of foreign language teaching. It reads his 1925 Crisis poem, “To a Negro Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret,” as a spectacularly unsuccessful foreign language lesson that rejoices in the failure of language countability and acquisition. By casting doubt on the viability of language mastery, the poem opens a space for nonnormative, emergent, and playful communication that responds to and cultivates environments that defy neat national and linguistic arrangements. In so doing, it anticipates a model of language instruction that present-day theorists of English Composition have termed a translingual approach, a social justice model that privileges the language habits and contexts of people who have typically been ignored, if not denigrated, in composition classrooms. This chapter uses this model to think through how “Negro Jazz Band” defunds projects of elitist, multilingual proficiency and replaces them with emancipatory, translingual play.