This chapter details the literary history of short fiction written in English by African Americans from 1853 through 1934. Beginning in the antebellum era during the age of reform and continuing through the Postbellum–Pre-Harlem era before concluding with the Harlem Renaissance or New Negro Movement, this article traces the aims and goals of activists, artists, and reformers such as Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes, contextualizing and contrasting their efforts to revise and critique the reductive depictions of African American life perceived within the dominant literary trends of their respective times.

Langston Hughes has earned iconic status in the history of African American letters. However, Hughes should also be understood as a radical political thinker and writer who sought to promote international anti-imperialism, Pan-Africanism, and a hemispheric understanding of Black diasporic history and culture. This chapter considers Langston Hughes’s writings on the Haitian Revolution – the play Emperor of Haiti (1936) and the opera libretto Troubled Island (1949) – as well as the presence of Haiti in Hughes’s poetry and journalism. These writings demonstrate that Haiti served as a pivot point in Hughes’s thinking, with Haitian history supplying Hughes with a heroic counter-narrative of Black freedom. Casting fresh light on the cultural currency of Haiti’s history of anticolonialism within radical African American circles, the chapter argues that Hughes’s Haitian writings carry a powerful message of an unfinished revolution, renegotiate diasporic relationships to Haiti, and proudly celebrate Black historical achievement in the Americas.