Let America Be America Again: Conversations with Langston Hughes

Over the last thirty years, Christopher De Santis has built an exceptional reputation as the foremost compiler of speeches, conversations, and essays by Langston Hughes. The scholar’s initial volume, Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender (1995), established new territory in primary texts. Six years later, the collection Fight for Freedom and Other Writing on Civil Rights (Collected Works, vol. 10, 2001) extended the range and genre of inquiry. A third collection, Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs (Collected Works, vol. 9, 2002), provided excellent documentation for the eventual critical analyses of Hughes’s aesthetics and global ideologies. A pithier design, the new book offers a biographical history of the writer’s social and creative thought from the 1920s to the late ’60s.Themes are well-organized within chronological order. Of the five sections, the transition from busboy poet to international voice, the racial discrimination in the nation during the twentieth century, the suppression of intellectual and political freedom during the McCarthy era of the fifties, and the ultimate triumph as an artist, are illuminating. Indeed, the various strands help chart the primary movements of the author’s intellectual life. There are varying roles of the writer as political activist and revolutionary and ultimately as populist theorist. According to the study, Hughes documented the murders of several gifted Chinese writers during the rise of global fascism in 1933. Consequently, he found himself detained and expelled from Japan.The De Santis collection represents Hughes as a definer of political concepts. As the writer clarified, fascism meant the imposition by force of will of one group’s prescriptions upon another. Such ideas helped bolster discrimination against African Americans in the United States. Indeed, Germans used the theory to rationalize the eradication of Jews, and Italians recognized such thoughts as an excuse to abuse Ethiopians.By the end of life, Hughes was especially concerned with cultural definition. In 1966 he contemplated the meaning of Négritude for the Senegalese poet Léopold Senghor. African American soul meant the same thing for both men. Hughes believed a mythic ancestry informed racial painting as well as literature. There existed a common subtext within all diasporic writing. In the democratic sense, he became a public theorist of literature.This book provides rich new contexts more than startling revelations. Sometimes in the autobiographies, Hughes desires to present a sympathetic white character in all his stories. Except for a disclosure to the McCarthy subcommittee in 1953, he would rarely disclose a reason. During his elementary school years in Topeka, Kansas, however, he was stoned during the return home—a white boy intervened to help him. For the rest of his life, Hughes believed some white people were decent. So, the Black writer must create aesthetic distance. “Step outside yourself, then look back.” By 1939, Hughes lost all sympathy with communism. As might be expected, he would call himself a documentary poet, downplaying the lyrical gifts that would inspire readers for a century. In 1963, he declared short stories to be his favorite genre, though he may never have disclosed the fact before.More than a decade earlier, he had written, “It seems to me that there is a crying need for good literary criticism.” Perhaps, it is disappointing now that the finest scholarship on his work has taken a decisive turn toward literary history again. After all, it has been fifty-seven years since the writer’s death. There have been only a few astute critiques of his imaginary work since James Emanuel’s Langston Hughes in 1967. But today scholars excavate textual treasures for use by future interpreters. Christopher De Santis produces an exemplary, meticulous work for a new century.