In the Footsteps of Langston Hughes: The Feminist Aesthetic of Alice Childress and Wahome Mutahi’s Newspaper Fiction

ABSTRACT While often relying on their protagonist’s persistent misogyny, Langston Hughes, Simple stories are, paradoxically, where some scholars have located his feminist aesthetic. We can further understand the truth of this seeming paradox through a comparative analysis of two writers influenced by the Simple stories. In the United States, Alice Childress’s Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life, writing alongside Hughes, indexed and fomented the nascent civil rights movement through the development of a female protagonist who embodies Claudia Jones’s theory of the political potential of Black working women. In Kenya, Wahome Mutahi’s Whispers column adapted Hughes to portray postcolonial urbanization and satirize the elite political class through a hard-drinking writer-protagonist, a close foil for the author himself, who struggles with his wife and daughter. With attention to depictions of patriarchy and its boundaries, as well as models of revolutionary love that the stories depict, this article shows how Mutahi’s and Childress’s revisions of Hughes’s Simple stories reveal the depth of his feminist aesthetic, and, moreover, the value of episodic realist fiction as a tool for analyzing the dialectical emergence of gender with race and class.